Upvote for ya. Basically it's pay to play here with the bots. If you post quality content and don't have a massive amount of followers or whales following you, you're going to have to buy bot votes to get on trending plain and simple.

There are a lot of flaws in the Steemit platform. Censorship and bots being two of them. Hopefully someday this will change. I've taken my time and dedicated it elsewhere because of this.