you might have a point there. I (for myself) have thought of them as different things. ie the normal and the witness votes. but the behavior seems indeed to be the same.

I do admit to using smartmarket to sell my spare voting power and to buy my votes. I was delegating a big part to smartsteem (bot) but have taken that down a notch. I have started re-delegating this to different projects like @steem-ambassador and now also a bit to @steemhunt.
I realize that my return will be less but am willing to live with that since it helps grow steem

I still believe selling my spare voting power is ok but I am no longer supporting the bidbots though and this has come through a lot of conversations with different people (you among them) these last weeks.

So thank you for the cool discord chat and for this honest reply