I agree with most of your points here, and I dont "feel better" hearing you lost something. The best case IMHO would be you didn't do it and didn't lose anything. But, aside from farming, using bots on comments is mostly .. pointless? Comments don't go to trending. Those boosted will only go up a bit in the discussion order, and won't get much more viewers.. and unless there are 20+ subthreads, it doesn't matter that much.. a few more % of those coming to this post, rest will either not read comments at all, or will reads all of them anyways. If you wanted to reward author, send him a tip IMHO.. or talk to people and drop them a link to that comment you find valuable.. let them read and upvote and spread it further.. so more viewers will come to this post. That would be much more effective promotion IMHO, though, much more time-consuming. Regarding bot'ting your own comments, I later checked and saw it's not a thing you do daily, so yeah, I get your idea of a 'protest', but I don't think boosting your own comments was a good form of a protest.. It's like agitating a swarm of bees to show them you don't like them flying around. If they sting, they won't notice or care about that. If you wanted anyone to notice any "positive use of bots", then try promoting good comments/posts of other people and stay vigilant for retaliation downvotes and nag downvoters with proofs that it was you who wanted to promote it, not author who farmed $ via bots.. That might have some net positive effect.. I suppose. Maybe.