I agree with the contest part and promoting interest articles.
Isn't it the beauty of the site to be found by people who really are interested in the contents of our publications ?
The bot aspect is like being on a double-edged sword you can get a lot of upvotes (some bring you 50+ upvotes). In a way I would feel more comfy with the idea of having people voting directly for contents and providing comments instead of comments like:
"Congrats you got an upvote of.0.9% courtesy from @name6 (often the author himself)"
Bots are great when used to promote a post from another member we appreciate to read instead oneself.
I know that you offer such service regularly 😉
Sometimes it just needs to be a matter of unselfishness, I think this is also the philosophy of the steemit.com founders.
What's your take ?
Giving a " tip " to an author is great use of a bidbot.
The purpose of having the XX amount of upvotes on your post is to make the article look active. For example someone is browsing Steemit and both you and I have an article on cooking.
For this example both our articles contain the same information and is equally as good as the other. One article bid bots were used on and fake upvotes purchased and the other article is organic.
The article that the bidbots were used on would have more cash value added to it and show more upvotes and likely more replies due to the article being in the " hot " or " Trending " Page of its tag. The organic article would have less making the article look less active. And while they both may contain the same info ... the user browsing Steemit is going to naturally click the article of interest with the most activity on it due to the fact it looks like that is what everyone else did, making the promoted article look like the better article.