I think the replies by bots speak for themselves LOL.

Certainly bots can be good. However, even good bots are more predictable than people and so I'm seeing bots built with good intentions often being gamed in ways that have a potentially negative impact on the community.

One example is a bot which upvotes comments and although the intention is to encourage engagement it winds up upvoting spam because the people creating the spam bots can easily work out where to spam in order to catch the bots votes. Similarly with bots like randowhale and whaleshares who can be triggered to upvote are sometimes found upvoting spam.

The trouble is that the solution is right there in front of us and nobody wants to use it. It's called a downvote although it is also known as the flag based on the UI it was given. If it costs money to combat bad bots then the developer of those bots should be contacted and asked to create ways to prevent potential damage by their own bots. Unfortunately humans often take criticism personally and offensively so that doesn't always go well.

Ideally the downvote would just be normalised but I've considered that we could be way passed getting the whole community to adopt that way of regulating rewards so that spam bots don't benefit too easily.

The downvoting drama of this week wouldn't have been realised for instance if those people were just downvoting arbitrarily on overvalued posts but instead they only do it when emotion calls for it it seems. So yeah, I think bots could be handled if people weren't so afraid of downvoting.