Welcome bots are subject to the termination of the community at any time. If we don't like it we can all flag them right out of existence. They only exist because we allow them to. We all make the rules, and the rules must change as our knowledge changes.

I personally feel that welcome bots are unnecessary and may even be abusing the system by creating profits for their creators to use while having done no actual work to improve steemit other than developing a random posting algorythm.

As I have said many times before, you are an exception to the spam rule. Bots are not. The community is still developing a concensus on the matter. 1 Year from now all the welcome bots may be gone. That's for us to decide. Me personally, my vote is just make a video play for all new users showing them all the features and leave it at that.

No spam bots should be allowed on the platform in my opinion, and any spam countermeasures should probably run silently in the background, flagging without actually commenting, as when they comment, that is creating more unnecessary spam on the blockchain. We certainly don't want to fight spam with spam.

I will not dwell on what was. I am focused on what is. And right now what is, is that your account is being protected by the community and we all have an eye on it to make sure you aren't unnecessarily flagged. Any spam you receive from bots, feel free to flag it yourself, @joeyarnoldvn after all you have just as much power as we do.