This question is often asked among the Steem community.

There are 2 view to answer it and I will try to explain them.

1. Bid bots are the advertising of Steem, they drive visibilty because the value of the post is what is used for it. It can change in the future when SMT is implemented, and also the dApps can use other kinds of sorting content like using a score, account based voting, etc. But until now, the vast majority of dApps like Steemit.com use the weight of the vote to sort content.

From this point of view bid-bots are good as they are the unique advertising system until now.

This attracts investors, and they are needed if we want to achieve mass adoption.

2. If the protocol allows the creation of bots and the vote-selling mechanisms, for sure they will be created. It is how humans work, we always try to maximize our Roi (return of investment).

Actually this is the best Roi you can take from the Steem Blockchain.

The bid-bots activity often is not aligned with the initial goal of rewarding quality content. This initial goal has changed over time as the Steem blockchain is moving towards being the blockchain for developers. This means that the initial thought may not be valid for some new dApps that emerge.

From my point of view is not bad that they exist.

Just another use case.

I hope the answer helps!

ticket4fun