Thanks for your reply @fishyculture. I believe the bots do more to help devoted and quality content creators than to hurt them. If you are a new content creator you can write the greatest posts in the world but you are quite unlikely to get noticed, and quite likely to end up giving up and leaving for another platform.

The bots provide a way to get your content in front of others here which then lets the curation system take effect. If people promote poor content using the bots, then they won't get many new followers or organic votes, and they might even get some downvotes which will ultimately discourage promotion of poor content.

On the other hand if an author uses the bots to promote content that is high quality then it will receive a lot of organic followers and votes and help bring that author up to the top, which is exactly what we want.

I mention in the post that I don't think bots should be about "making money", at least not directly from its vote. That's what I mean by my hope that the bot tracker site will help create an efficient market for post promotion.

The bots are not going away, even if I stop supporting them. So rather than fight against something that is going to be a part of this platform either way, I think it's better to work to discourage the negative uses and encourage the positive ones. That is precisely what I am trying to do.