I am curious how you made the determination that the votes you bought lead to views and follows. Small votes (votes not enough to land on the trending page of a tag) in my experience do not add any views at all. You are more than likely picking up the views and follows organically as a quality poster and commenter and just conflating that with the effect of buying votes. The biggest issue that I see with buying votes is that if you zoom far enough out to the macro level, any "gains" realized by individual vote buyers are dwarfed by the gains realized by the largest whales on the platform who rent their SP to the vote selling services. Buying votes funnels money up to the very top of the pyramid. Steem already has a terrible wealth distribution with a very worrisome amount held by a small handful of accounts and the rise of vote selling in the past few months is increasing that wealth disparity at an increasing rate. This is actually a very serious problem for any economy and for a cryptocurrency seeking investors it is a HUGE problem. That the largest stakeholders of STEEM, by and large, are taking the short term profit at expense of long term health of the platform should be ringing loud alarm bells. This is the potential death knell of STEEM.
You could be right @carlgnash. I think even without landing on trending, even just spending not very much on bots you can still land on Hot for a while. Which makes a difference. I made this connection because even though I experimented with bots on a few posts, the vast majority of my posts don't have any paid upvotes and I can see the view number on each one. Some of my older ones would only have between 10-20 views, which were probably coming from the few followers I had.
I could also see how many new followers I was getting. Now as you said, they COULD have been organic, but yea, I think it's about equally likely I picked those guys up from the small bump in exposure.
But yea, at this point I can see the bots are a losing strat, they're like a desert mirage. In the end, the best plan forward is exactly what some Steemit OG's told me from the jump: Post good stuff, engage people, be patient.
Also I totally agree with you about the macro problem with bots. I'm a bit torn on how big a problem its going to be in the future though, because technically it has an easy fix. They can just ban bot upvotes. I think from a business perspective Steem is killing it compared to other blockchain platforms and their focus is probably on growth of all the Steem blockchain projects as a whole right now vs trying to perfect Steemit. Even with the problems, there are thousands of new users daily, and people are using and enjoying the platform. Of course there is a lot they can improve, but it's doing quite well now problems and all which I think is promising for the future of Steemit.
in all honesty SMTs probably make it a moot point. But it wouldn't be as simple as banning upvote botes - the only way to do that would be to roll back the last hardfork and eliminate delegations and that ain't happening. BTW I just realized I failed to upvote this post before commenting, I wasn't trying to be a douchebag LOL just rectified that with an upvote. Love the original upvote bot art.