Ah yes, "bumping." There's a good old term I haven't seen in a while.
Resteeming is basically a kind of bumping, in the sense that if you resteem someone's posy it goes through YOUR followers' feeds as if it were new. Which can work well if you have loyal followers. Steemit doesn't really have the greatest interface for ongoing "activity" on our posts, perhaps because the payout period is just 7 days (it used to be 30).
I have noticed that bumping can get fresh eyes but who really knows the range of your post at any given time. Resteeming gets a garenteed # of viewers but rarely does those groups have heavy upvoters? Upvoting your self or paying for upvotes dont benefit you as much as it would for fresh eyes.
30 days is a lot more fair for content creators. Still not the best, but a lot more fair than 7 days.
Steemit says it is all about making things better for content creators, but when bots and self-upvoting get real votes, whereas just putting yourself out there to gather a following barely gets noticed, it does get a tad disconcerting.
Especially when some of the early adopters, now whales, put out NO real content pf their own, just cut and paste stuff from the Internet, which they may or may not correctly attribute to the actual creators, and they make more on one post by self-upvoting than I make in a week - or sometimes a month - of actually producing daily real content.
I realize it is still in beta, but Steemit needs to address these issues, because they are losing creators left and right, who are tired of the bull and just want to be treated fairly.