Hi Richard, thanks for your comment. Not representing Thereal or the team, though I am a moderator there, I can tell you that we look for the best content before providing users with a whitelist ranking. This means, that to receive a huge upvote from our users, you would need to have a rank 3 (excellent). Plagiarism, hate speech, racism, spam, etc. are not whitelisted, and even in some cases blacklisted, so that kind of content will not receive our support. That is why I as small Steem investor support from the inception SmartSteem and the reason why I work with the team to promote it actively.

I also consider that many bots which do not have this kind of quality separation, are indeed a bad seed for the success of the platform.