Well said. The reason I experimented with a virtually blank post was because I could take quality out of the picture. If I were to do everything else exactly the same with one of my best high-quality posts, chances are, if the price of STEEM and/or SBD didn't change too much to eat my profits, I'd see similar results. I'd have also likely had more human upvoters, so I'd have had to account for the wider distribution of the rewards pool.

And to your point on earlier voters, that's why @curie doesn't vote on quality posts right away. They have very strict criteria on post quality, and other factors. One of those is, they don't vote on posts that have received a bidbot vote. I suspect that has less to do with ethical concerns regarding bidbots and more to do with whether or not they can reasonably expect a positive ROI from their upvote when voting after the bidbot.

The 'harm' that bid-bots do to the reward pool (if you see it as harm) is not about the distribution of curation rewards, it's that bid-bots change the distribution of rewards from 'quality' driven curation to 'purchased' curation. Whether this is good or bad is a values-driven position, not a quantitative 'provable' position.

That's what I've been saying all along. I don't think you can quantify results that way.

Thanks for your input.