It sounds like the moral of the story is to NOT use bot voting because you are more likely to wind up voting on SHIT because you're not actually "curating", you're simply trying to earn profit based on a specific author's past work.

There's a saying that goes something like: Past performance is not an indicator of future success.

This is why I feel strongly that any voting bot is actually not in the best interest of the future success of Steemit. The reason curation rewards exist are for quality content to be raised to the greater community, NOT for profit.

Curation rewards are not meant to be a giant whale circle jerk. By not ACTIVELY curating posts, you are doing a disservice to the Entire Steemit Community.

Sure, auto vote bots may have worked when the community was smaller. There were fewer authors to choose from. It makes sense that you would auto vote the best / most consistent ones and manually curate the one-off posts that you enjoyed.

But the environment has changed. And you must adapt appropriately in order to ensure the future success of the platform.

Please end the Circle Jerk of whales who post ANYTHING and receive literally HUNDREDS of high-valued SteemPower votes. Regardless of the quality of their content.

All this action does is encourage new users to "follow suit" because "that's the way Steemit must work if everyone who is successful is doing it."

Please stop the madness.