Thank you for articulating this nicely. I'm not pro-bid bot use because of two main reasons.

1. Dilution of influence over reward pool.
2. Lowered curation rewards

However if rewards continue to dilute further and push comes to shove, that just might be the only recourse around here for most who aren't supporting bid-bot use currently.

I've powered up a lot of what i've earned here as well invested a lot of my own funds in 2 years. So it does hurt to see day to day earnings deplete with no fault of your own. Especially considering we're just around 38-42K active users and 8K-85K active voters of which a large percentage are bots or alt accounts as per what i've heard recently.

SMTs might be great eventually but at the moment I don't see how it will improve the price and even if you earn extra token for your content, these SMTs themselves need to have a great value in the market for anyone to earn a decent income here to add to their livelihood or fund new projects to promote the blockchain, tokens and dapps.

A lot of my own plans for growing the community are on hold due to lack of votes which just 2-3 months ago were great and were funding a lot of activities and there were 2x planned for the 2nd half of which pretty much all are junked until things improve.

Now we're left to fend for ourselves and that's not going add to the growth of this platform and that presents an issue as well as an opportunity such as bid bots for users who don't get organic traction on their content.

This is a major problem for growth around here which needs to be tackled at the earliest. But I'm not sure how and who is going to address these issues as I don't see much from Inc on these matters.