Hello, I'm a creator of Steemhunt, a daily ranking community for cool new products on top of Steem blockchain. I began this project two months ago, and honestly these are my thoughts/struggles about voting bot issues.

1. There are three types of abuse in Steemit - 100% self voting, Circulating votings on self accounts, and delegating SP to bid bots.
2. Many people agree that the first and second one are abuse.
3. Not many people agree that delegating SP on bid bots is abuse.
4. There are two main problems with delegating SP on bid bots.
5. First, bid bots do not return any profit to the users who bid. Actually the return is -5 ~ -15% to their paid amount. It only returns commissions to bid bot operators and rewards for delegators. This means that delegation to bid bot is another type of SELF VOTING POOL.
6. Second, most of whale's SP are converged on bid bots nowadays. I can't find the exact amount, but top 10 bid bots' full voting amount is over 250 SBD now. However, bid bots' upvoting are not creating any values on our communities because IT IS JUST AN AD. The voting is not linked to the value of the content. Thus, most of whale's SP pools are just using for nothing.

Honestly, we are quite stressful nowadays because we also invested our pocket money to have a DApp business based on Steem. I believe our project can create lots of values on Steem community - I explained our vision on our launching post here. We have a short-term plan to compete with Product Hunt to attract users from more than 8 mil MAU pools. We have also mid-term plan to make HUNT token economy based on SMT platform to create "Product Influencer's Crowd Funding Platform."

To do this, we are running SP delegation program by giving 5% rewards to the delegators. The explanations of this program is here. So far we gathered 22k from 14 delegators. We feel very thanksful to them because they delegated their precious SP to us even though THEY COULD GAIN FAR HIGHER PROFITS IF THEY DELEGATED IT TO BID BOTS. They delegated to us because they believe that investing Steem DApp proejcts are very crucial for Steem's long-term growth.

We really think this situation should be changed. The start-ups like us on Steem are struggling a lot to receive SP delegations from whales because of bid bots. And those bid bots are not creating ANY SINGLE VALUE ON STEEM.

I'm sorry for self-voting on my comment, but I just want to make people realise the problems of delegating bid bots. Thanks for reading my opinion.

I just wrote about this issue on my post here - https://steemit.com/steem/@project7/bid-bots-are-killing-steem.