The (bank) whales always win. Makes you wonder how Steemit.com wins. By there being people willing to witness to keep it running? By holding a lot of Steem and hopefully this platform growing will make their holdings more valuable? If that is the case, then it means they do want to cash out. And if they don't want to cash out, then a benevolent project made to be self-sustainable in order to provide this environment? One wonders, but I digress.

From the few bot examples I've looked at, people gain visibility, and while they don't really gain money, they also don't really lose it (just trade some SBD for SP), but they just recycle it. In some sense, they're gaining, because if you spend X and get X back, but also gain something else on top (such as more pageviews), then it's a pure gain. And that seems to be what is actually going on currently.

It's like people who spam in order to get more visibility. The idea may not match the reality of how things turn out, especially from the "effort" you put in.