Interesting post and topic firepower, here are my 50 cents on bidbots.

Bidbots are a cancer that will destroy steemit if they are allowed to proliferate as they have been over the last year or so. I haven't used a bidbot in nearly 6 months and I will never use one again.

Here is my reasoning why bidbots are a massively negative mechanism:

Bidbots rarely return a profit for the people bidding for a vote and in most instances return negative ROI. This means they only serve 2 purposes in regards to content creators.

1. To allow less than quality content to be boosted up into the trending pages:

2. They prey on the hopes & dreams of decent content creators to make something of themselves on steemit. Drawing new steemians into cycles of making very little profit on their posts by spending money to maintain the illusion of success. This is the worst kind of mechanism for a creative platform like steemit, as any writers of a certain level will be put off immediately and look for other places where they can legitimately make decent money from their content.

There are only two sets of people who benefit from bidbots:

1. Greedy people who would rather delegate there SP to a bidbot owner for a return of the profits than curate new and exciting content.

2. The bidbot owners. I have seen various bot owners pleading poverty, saying they are running at a loss etc. Hmmnnn, I don't believe this whatsoever.

So, if we have a look at these points it becomes abundantly clear that bidbots are raping the reward pool in the most cynical way. By preying on the hopes and dreams of people, while facilitating some whales in not spreading their VP around steemit to help the platform grow and sustain growth of everyone.

In conclusion, I am a curie curator, and I have seen many authors of a very high quality, many of whom have been published outside of steemit, leave this platform over the last 6 months. It is these mechanisms of corruption which is causing this bleed of talent. The people who can make a difference at the top need to decide what they want steemit to be, devs could stop these corrupt mechanisms if they chose to and I personally think it is a balance between content and entrepreneurship. Sure there needs to be businesses/initiatives running on steemit to sustain it's economy, but this doesn't mean we should just blindly accept businesses which rape the reward pool and give nothing back at the expense of the content creators. If there was no quality content here, there wouldn't be a platform.

P.s. I continually power up my earnings from curie curation and posts so I am invested in this platform but i don't have any further funds to boost my own SP up to the point I would like. I strongly believe in the future of steemit and it is intrinsically built in to my future plans for life. I will never give up :-)