Please allow me to respond to this content with my opinion.

There is a value to upvoting as a service. You may not like it, but people have to pay for visibility on nearly every free-to-play social site. Additionally, it benefits the authors that do not want to have to be an investor in the Steem platform but simply wants to optimize the visibility of their content.

There are more attractive options, such as the HoboDAO which aims to be a daily contest for independent journalism and informative blogging. But it still costs, with a submission fee in a token, the Hobo token, in order to submit your work for review and possible curation and 5x token rewards to the select winners based on quality work.

Curie is another great project that benefits people. However, services such as TipU are legitimate businesses performing a service that can benefit sincere authors that recognize that they can increase their readership through paid promotion. That is just rational economics.

Amazon is full of indie authors, which is wonderful, but it also means there is a difficulty in authors gaining visibility. For this reason, the authors that are willing to purchase increased visibility benefit from it and experience a higher rate of book sales.

It would be cool if quality made it to the top, but that is just not how things ever work. There are many amazing books that never become best sellers, and plenty of best sellers that are inferior to the lesser known books.

Why is it this way? Everything always comes to supply and demand in a free market. Once indie authors were empowered to be able to self-publish a major funnel in the supply/demand ratio was obliterated. We then entered the world of content bountifulness. Yay! That's a good thing, but then there was also a snag...

Most indie authors end up making something really sad like $100 for the lifetime of their book sales. But why? Because there's now so many books, readers can't read them all. A good book can be buried under the search list for its topic. Amazon widened the mouth of the funnel by a lot, but a natural filter still exists: content consumption rates. When we ran into that wall Amazon realized it could help some of the people gain visibility and profit from the deal.

The same is happening on Steem. A lot of people rushed to Steem to create content, and there's so much content production that your post ends up buried within minutes as new content under the same general category gets posted to the blockchain. This is a problem, but in an economy, every problem means there's an opportunity for someone to make profit by providing a solution.

A variety of solutions enter the scene. A common solution that has emerged is the contest system. The HoboDAO is aiming to be one such type of solution, as a decentralized curation community supporting quality work. But the service is not exactly for free, and its a contest, so its not a sure thing that your submission will even receive curation.

Then you have services like Steem Engine tribes/communities with their specific tokens. They are essentially centralized SMTs before SMTs arrive.

Then you have bidbots. The bidbot service is a simple and rather traditional concept. Sure, it does mean that you're getting upvotes that are not based on quality of content, but it doesn't mean the content is of poor quality. It simply means that the author is willing to purchase enhanced visibility.

I argue that bidbots are actually beneficial for Steem. Not easy to believe me? Let's look at what is happening with the many people using Steem as their main income due to being in a country with a very poor economy. Most of those people get free accounts and post hoping to earn STEEM. This is because a lot of these people cannot afford to invest large amounts of money into powering up their SP. So, Steem is a community made up of authors and investors, which is not the same thing as investing authors.

Bidbots increase the dollar value of STEEM because they go to the exchanges to buy STEEM and power it up for long-term use. They intend to keep much of the value powered up/staked because its their daily job. This is what I call a good hodler, and many bitcoiners would think so too.

Ultimately, owners of SP are people that bought something and it is network influence. They have the right to use their network influence how they wish.

Think about SP like real estate. You bought a house in a neighborhood because you liked the house. Your wife then decides to do a home business of tattoo work, and your neighbor comes knocking on the door saying they don't want you to do a tattoo service in your home because they think tattooed people in their neighborhood will effect the price of their home.

There's nothing illegal about doing that job out of your home, but the neighbor feels it hurts them somehow. Should they have the right to mess with what you do in your own home or on your land because they believe it "ruins" the neighborhood? I say no. I say that as long as you are non-violent, what you do with your property is your business.