Congratulations @crypto.piotr for authoring such a popular post! It seems I'm late to the party but I'll give my 2 cents on this topic as I'm very interested in this as well.

Table of Contents

• Bid-bots are hurting the platform
• However, there's no other way for minnows to gain visibility
• Solution: change trending

I personally feel bidbots are destroying the platform and hurting the initial intent of the platform, to help rank authors in terms or quality and reward those authors who consistently author good posts.

However, many people including myself still use knowing the harmful effects they have. You may call it greed, but I just want my work to be seen. Sometimes, when you put so much effort into a post and see 2 comments from bots and under a dollar payout, it's really disheartening. When I used bidbots, I may not earn money but at least I get some comments sometimes and discussions going, that's quite important to me! However, for now I'm focusing on exams so I have limited time to comment.

A solution to this may be having a limit on hot and trending pages for authors. For example, only one article per author for every 50 articles on the trending page. So, if someone has an article that should be number 3, number 7 and number 12 on trending, the article at number 3 will stay at number 3 but the article at number 7 will be pushed to 51 and the article at number 12 will be pushed to number 101. This should decentivise authors from spamming trending and hot pages with bid bots and help give more authors a chance to be in the top!

(Upvote own comment for visibility)