A lot of folks have aired their concerns regarding the use of bots in the SteemIt for authors to get more resteems, more votes and higher payouts.
There's plenty of these services now, with more arising each day. While I'm not a fan of the auto-curation bots...I think if an author is willing to pay to have his content resteemed or upvoted by one of 'those' bots ( 
Look at the major social media networks of today; Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest (to name the largest).
There are literally hundreds of self-serve panels as well as 'providers' that will share your posts, upvote them, retweet them, repin them and all of that sort for a cost. In this case, the promotion is sometimes for an SEO boost, but the majority of the time...it's for popularity in a niche or for a social post to be trending or seem hot.
At least here we can spend money on those bots openly and get a direct reward from our investments, fiscal as well as promotional.
To me, that's more legitimate, because it gives the currency a transactional value outside of its' conversion to fiat or other cryptos.
Any thoughts?