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Many of my fellow Steemians have weighed in on this issue. You can check out a few peoples takes here, here, and here.

I've also had some pretty long conversations in comment threads about this. Since then my position on bots has changed. I originally didn't see all the problems with bots so I wasn't all that opposed to them. I think the reason for this was that I hadn't witnessed the sort of abuse that REALLY shines a spotlight on the worst case scenario use cases of bots.

For the record, my idea of the worst use of bots is someone promoting a post or posts with little or no value to the top of trending for days at a time. I think there are several really bad problems with this.

• It pushes down content that is potentially actually good.

Basically making the Trending page ineffective at fulfilling it's purpose.

• It makes Steemit look "cheap" to any new users.

If Steemit were a magazine, the Trending page would be the cover. If the cover looks shitty, you're probably going to assume the content is shitty as well.

• It drains the reward pool for the wrong reasons.

This is more of a Macro problem IMO but it's still there. We would need to see data and analytics to really grasp how big of an issue this is.

You made it through a lot of words, here's some of the "Making of" for the art above!

but...

There is an opposite end to this issue. If you're a new user of Steemit, you've no doubt felt the frustrations of getting started. It can feel like you're tossing your post into a raging river of posts where you've got minutes to get some visibility before it drowns in the endless torrent that is the New section.

So some people are doing really creative things to help with this problem. There's @minnowsupport that does curation as well as operating a free bot that will shoot you an upvote if you request it in their discord channel.

There are a fair amount of resteem channels especially in #art like @fineartnow, @artzone, @steemartists, etc. I think these are all great attempts to address this problem, but these guys can't be everywhere at the same time and as the user base grows on Steemit, this problem is only going to get worse.

Context before solutions

• Bots aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

When you look into how a lot of different bots work, I don't think banning them from Steemit is practical, or potentially even possible.

• Bots are a tool.

Tools aren't good or bad. Tools can be used to build or to destroy. The person or people using the tools are the ones we have to judge, not the tools themselves.

• The built in promotional system of Steemit isn't that effective, or at least not as effective as bots.

Imagine if youtube had a Commercials channel, that was ONLY composed of ads. Would you ever look at it? No, I didn't think so. So it's not exactly the same thing because people on Steemit aren't exactly trying to sell you something, but for all practical purposes we are. We're all trying to "sell" our content, but I don't think that's how most people imagine it. But I think the psychological perception of the Promoted section does feel like you're selling something and I think that's a put off.

• Bots work.

I've experimented with bots and found them easy to use and after not much experimentation I can get predictable results with them. By using Steambottracker you can get a good and easy to understand picture of what you're going to get for your money. In the worst case scenario I still about broke even in ROI, but I ALWAYS gained views and followers, which was the goal in the first place.

Thoughts on solutions

To be clear I think it's a problem that these are the options in front of us as users, but this is the reality. We can either adapt or quit. Of course there is the chance that the people developing Steemit will fix this for us, but I plan to still use Steemit in the meantime.

I really like this platform, problems and all and I want to see it succeed. I want a future where I can smugly tell my friends that are just getting on Steemit, that I was there before it was cool :p

So in terms of platform solutions, I think what they should do is copy what other social networks have done and

• Get rid of the promoted tab and put promoted posts in with the other posts, but add an icon that lets you know that it's a promoted post. If possible it would be great if we could even keep the bid bots so you have options as to how you'd like to promote your post, but even if you use bid bots, your post still shows up as promoted.
• In addition to that, there needs to be a button next to individual posts that lets you hide that post from your feed forever, so basically if you're promoting a post you've got your shot, but if your content is shit, everyone is just going to get rid of it.

This way we can still address the problem that every new user is going to have, which is getting initial traction. So if they want to pay, they can promote their post, and if it's good content, they'd have their shot at the masses, but we'd be easily able to get rid of the spam, and the Trending page hogs that pay to stay there for days at a time in all the top spots.

This way, that method of abusing bots, should become unprofitable. Especially if we combine that with coordinated downvoting for obvious abusers, but honestly I don't even think that would be necessary once it became obvious that that tactic doesn't work anymore.

But in the meantime, because it's no telling when or IF Steemit plans to address these issues, I think, if you have something that you really want people to see, that you've really put a lot of love and work into, use bots responsibly. Also for the whales and dolphins out there with a powerful upvote, I'd say not to shun someone just because they're using bots. People are going to use bots, I think it's better if people with legitimately good content use them vs people with crap content and you can help the cream rise to the top by supporting those users so they rise above the spammers and scammers.

I've read the comments of some users along the lines of "New users just wanted to get rich quick without putting in the work". I don't think that's the case, I think it's more accurate to say new users, and well anyone doesn't want to do WASTED work. If you put a lot of work into something and no one even sees it, then it's a waste. If people saw it, didn't like it, and passed that would be one thing, but when you can see a post gets less than 10 views, that means it didn't get a chance to be accepted or rejected.

So in closing, it would be great if some platform level solutions were introduced to address these issues, but in the meantime or in case that's not in the roadmap, we have to learn to coexist with our robot overlords.

If you made it this far, thanks for that! This is my first post where the artwork hasn't been the central focus. If you like the art, check out my blog, there's plenty there!