I think that in a way, even on Twitter or Facebook, when you pay to promote a post, you're circumventing the the community's input on the value of your post, like you say. It's just that on Twitter or Facebook, the value is only expressed by likes/retweets, and not with rewards. That's what made me wonder, in my post, how ethical using bidbots and buying upvotes is.
But I didn't think about it in terms of demanding attention at the expense of other people's rewards. And in fact, I didn't realize until I read this, and then did some research, that the reward pool was fixed (though it makes total sense). Now I see the role of the downvotes, and why people would want to use them against bidbots.
So today I learned a lot about Steemit! And this changes my thinking about bidbots and paid upvotes a lot. Thank you!
Glad I could be of help