There is a human behind every bot. As a bot user myself, I can tell you that I DO read content, I DO upvote posts manually when I have the time to read, and I DO engage with the community.
Bots are not perfect. They don't have the intelligence yet to vote exactly the same way people would vote. But if they could, would there be a reason to complain?
Maybe we just need better bots.
As far as crap content, that's subjective. The trending page has a lot of bot upvotes. It also almost always has something I want to read. And stuff I don't want to read. And a Chinese girl in a bikini, which I don't care to read but might want to look at ;)
So here is your manual upvote from somebody who uses bots. Cheer up, work hard, and don't worry about the bots. They're not hurting Steemit.
I feel myself miserable when I got upvotes, say, from good-karma and all his trail and I know none read my great post.
I feel like I got alms instead of earned reward.
I'm going to be brutally honest here, so turn off your feelings and try to be objective.
I just scanned some of your posts. And there wasn't much that caught my attention. That doesn't mean it's bad content, but I think you need to work on your headlines, minimum. And your content. Looking inside some posts, I see they're mostly short and not very in depth.
Here's some of what I saw:
A link to a video with a short description.
A recipe for compote. There are a lot of food posts on Steemit. Hard to get noticed.
Your morning routine. Sorry, that's not very interesting. Neither is my morning routine.
A post about artist Steve Hanks. Nice paintings, but you didn't write much and they aren't your paintings.
A post of a photo you took in Crimea. Good photo, not amazing.
You've just dropped your post in Steemit ocean. Nice. I see you worked hard on this one. 87 votes and 232 views. But some of those votes were probably bots. To me, that would feel worse than 232 votes and 87 views.
Heaven is For Real movie review. You made $25 with 23 votes and 33 views, without writing anything significant and just posting a link to the movie trailer. This is classic crap content. Zero effort, decent payout. Nearly everything on the trending page has way more effort put into it.
An original oil pastel painting by you. 27 votes 29 views $25.85 payout I actually like the colors of this painting. You should do more.
Scanning further I see that your art tends to make decent payouts.
So if these are mostly bot upvotes, I'd say yeah, it's mostly alms and not true rewards. Most of your content seems to involve little effort, except for your artwork.
I'm working on a novel. I spend weeks working on a single chapter. When I finally post the chapter I usually get very few upvotes or views. But it doesn't hurt my feelings one bit. Because I enjoy the writing process and expressing myself creatively.
I have one true fan who looks forward to reading my work. And I appreciate my one fan very much. But even without one fan I would keep writing my novel.
That's not to say I don't want to make money. Everyone does. But my time is limited. That's why when it comes to voting, I use a bot in addition to manual voting when I have time. And I understand why others use bots.
But there are real people on here. Improve your content and you will attract them if your content is consistently good. They might not be whales but at least they won't be bots.
And instead of worrying about bots you should concentrate on appreciating those who appreciate your content.
Attach these same posts to some @whale and it gets $500+
I challenge you to find a specific post on his page and compare it to any post on the trending page. Tell me why it deserves to be on the trending page, and why it deserves a whale vote. Please be specific. Does it have new information that will impact a lot of people? Is it super entertaining? Is it well thought out and / or profound?
He has a couple of decent posts. People that are always on the trending page consistently produce decent to great posts. Sure, a lot of them are about things I'm not personally interested in, but even those are written by writers who consistently wrote well and long enough to start getting noticed by whales. If you look at the trending page right now and then check the profiles, you'll see that most are by people who have been on Steemit since the beginning and / or have worked hard and produced a lot of content to build up their reputation.
Some people will work hard and never make it to trending. But they make more money and get more engagement than they would on Facebook.