I agree so much. If I owned this site, I would ban ALL bots entirely. If the point of the site is to interact with each other as human beings in order to better each other, even financially, then it should be a fair process. Paying for votes is cheating the system. It's the lazy way out. There's really no other way to spin that. Laziness breeds shortcuts which breeds ways to corrupt a good thing.

I am new to steemit and I realize that a lot of people differ with my opinion, especially people who use bots, obviously, but it's disheartening to me to see what's going on.

I just assumed it was always the norm here, once I discovered the bots. But now I'm seeing that it's more common now than it used to be. I feel like it could very well kill the site eventually, at the very least it could deaden the spirit behind it, and alienate the legit participants. Thanks for this posting. I feel better now that I've vented! lol