You might think about the bots whatever you like – but one thing is for sure – they are a reality and they do not go away quickly. There is nothing we can do about it in the short term and although I do not like them I use them myself.
A review of the bots activity
After all, these people are selling a service – but you have no clue who you are dealing with. The people in the background are anonymous and there is no legal way to get your money back if you have been treated unfairly. And this is a reality, it happens everyday.
One quick examples from last night:
3.4.2018:
Since the beginning of the voting last voting round at 17:53:57 roughly 4.0 SBD were paid to estabond. A huge 10 SBD transfer came in after the round had started.
However, the bot refunded roughly 2.5SBD during the voting round as they were invalid. These should not have been counted. The total bid value should thus have come down to 1.5. The payment of 1.1 SBD made at 20:24:39 by nicestbot should thus have received an upvote of roughly 73% - instead it was just 4.27%. The rest of the votes went to a lot of other posts which seem to have not participated in the voting round.
The worst about this is that the service is listed at steembottracker.com advertising that the minimal ROI is -10%.
Such behaviour is unacceptable and illegal. So
Other very common behaviour of the bots is that they do not vote with 100% if the bids are too low for them. I have seen this recently with several bots. While one could argue that this is a good mechanism, it should at least be written down somewhere.