I have been back and forth on up-vote bots. I recently tried them again and ran the numbers. It isn't coming out as profitable as they seem at first. Looks like I'm pretty much breaking even.
I have also been thinking about how it increases the concentration of wealth on steemit. These bots just make the whales richer while the minnows are left with pennies for gains. I think I'm done using most of them. I will still be supporting and using Hive account@treeplanter because I believe it is a good cause. I will be using it to upvote other people more than I use it on my own posts. How many people send a bid on behalf of someone else? Not very many. I think that is the tell that voting bots are being driven by the greed of the steemit user base.
The trending page is broken in my opinion. Need an trending page ranked by organic upvotes. On reddit stuff rises to the top because it is good.