The bots mostly don't earn anything, compared to the total payouts it's peanuts. It's up to the users. Any one of you can downvote (or report to #steemitabuse on https://steemit.chat) a spam post with a small payout to make it worthless. Nobody will keep running an unprofitable bot forever.
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Very true, I just worry that it will render the #hot tag essentially useless and possibly trick users into thinking something has a lot of attention when it may just be one person with an army of bots who like a post (or mis-upvoted a post).
EDIT: I know bots will be a healthy population of Steemit in the future. But posts like this one are meant to motivate bot-makers to be careful with how they make them.