While I think that anyone at all, whether gaming or putting sweat equity into producing vote winning posts, ultimately aiming to make a living out of it, is still pulling money out of the Steem market cap. The bots are the most clear example of it.

But look on the bright side. These people can't make money forever gaming the vote system. Sooner or later their costs outnumber their rewards, and then they go away, smugly proud of their raid on the Steem market cap.

At that point they are leaving more than coming, because they successfully, massively deplete the pool for rewards. You might be right for feeling a bit cut over this, because it seems contrary to the rewards system. But they will eventually quit, and the 'pump and dump via voting' process will stop being profitable, and those remaining with big vests in SP will be those who actually are here to make use of the discussion system to help foster a productive development and outreach program, in all kinds of directions, which will ultimately bring in the rewards.

Maybe there is still yet to be another wave of these robo-whales, maybe a couple more. But no marketplace is without the bears, looking to dig in, and skip out with their short sell profits.

They can't take away from the fundamental vests of people who they can't squeeze money out of.

These people will come to be the whales in a shrunken pool of Steem. These people will manually upvote genuine good content, especially when it relates to boosting the investment in the platform. Sure, this will yield a pool that will see more robo-whales show up, but if you are sure about Steem's effective mechanisms, you just hold your steem. I might even say, that it is possible that it could be my nest-egg building up slowly but surely, and in 2 years time, and this thing is still happening, probably my SP will be so big that I can cash a little out and fund non-steem related endeavours, while maintaining my position as a curator.

It's not meant to be a short term gain equation. Those who do this ultimately can only win a little bit out, and most of what they are winning, they are winning by outwitting the other big investors, of which many will also be running bots to game the vote rewards.

That money was never really in the pool in the first place. If you manage to capture a little bit of it, and you are serious about building up Steem, then you also will be able to have more power to flag these assholes later on, destroy their reputation and voting power, and diminish their malign influence.

If this was not tl;dr for you, go check out my post here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@l0k1/the-number-one-guaranteed-way-to-make-money-on-steem Understanding the dynamics of steem's everyone is both shareholder and employee model should show you that, if you really want to make money out of steem, you need to divert a bit of energy from your quality content creation, do outreach work to promote the increased understanding in the community at large about what Steem actually IS, or like me, build the utility of the platform that by itself also will boost userbase and investment.

We are all in this together and when the Robo-Whales have had their way with each other, and inadvertently powered up a lot of serious Steem faithful, the situation will start to move more and more towards a cohesive understanding of how we all can profit from this group enterprise.