You're right, I don't get money back from advertising elsewhere but neither do I with these bidbots. All I've done is put money into this steemit ecosystem and the amount of steem and value of that token continues to go down in my profile. So I'm definitely not doing this to try to game the system because that's clearly not working for me. I previously wrote long blog posts here but then I realized people rather watch a video so that's what I started doing. I see your point of view but I see this similar to Reddit promotions. If you look at trending pages on reddit you will see paid ads sprinkled in between the organic results. I think what's happening here is it's just out of control and most trending posts are paid promotions. In that case, I understand your viewpoint.