Great post @penston. I hear the other side of this coin all the time as well - I know for a fact that many users are earning large profits doing similar things as far as putting in a large SBD bid on a post close to payout but timing it out to where they are guaranteed a large % vote and a good return. I think even if you can realize a profit, using paid vote services is detrimental to the long term health of the platform. And if the average user is actually losing money on paid vote services then this entire shit show is even worse than I thought. New users come on board and are told (by MANY people) that the only way to get your posts seen is to pay for votes. Then they do so and actually lose money. Can you imagine a worse introduction to a platform than to be told you have to pay money to make money, so you actually pay money and up LOSING money? This is not going to get people hooked on Steem, to put it mildly.

One point of clarification - while @humanbot (and @r-bot, my other curation account) do upvote quality undervalued posts, there is no channel for an author to call for these upvotes for their own post. You can submit links to posts by other authors in the comments to my @humanbot Curator Incubator post. @sanmi, on the other hand, and bless his heart, DOES allow for self promotion and you can drop links to your own posts for his review at the @thehumanbot blog.

I know - @thehumanbot and @humanbot are confusingly similar in names - it was a coincidence, but our mission statements are complementary and we have joined forces (we refer to each other as "step-brothers" because we have different dads - I am @humanbot's "dad" and @sanmi is @thehumanbot's "dad").

Cheers - Carl