“In my opinion voting bots should not be used to directly profit off of the value of their vote, but instead should be used to gain visibility for posts which leads to a much larger ROI (for good posts) from increased followers and organic upvotes.“
I think there is some middle ground here where everyone can profit. What is the average rate of return on delegated steem power to a bot with 0.9/1/1.1 settings? I believe it is quite high no matter what.
Publishing the settings on steembottracker would be a good idea. It may actually increase the number of maxed out rounds if all bidders know they won’t end up with a large negative investment.
The problem is that if people can profit from only the value of the bot's vote, vs from the added visibility to their post, then that encourages spammers to make a bunch of low effort, low quality posts just to grab some profit from the bots.
By setting the fill limit to 1.1 or 110% (in addition to setting the min_post_age to 20 minutes) I believe that it will help prevent this type of spam - since it will no longer be profitable - and encourage promotion of actual quality content.
I definitely plan to publish this information on steembottracker.com in the near future.
Yes there can be more indirect value that comes to posts after a vote comes in.
Ultimately the market will determine how this plays out. As long as bid bots are profitable more will be added and when they are not profitable people will stop using them.
Interesting perspective you had earlier with the idea that your blog on steem is a business rather than thinking of it as another social media site.