At the 3rd time of asking, today I finally received a response to this question from the 'founder and developer of Smartsteem.com - biggest vote-selling market with over 3500 sellers and 2nd biggest bid-bot with over 2.4 Million Steempower'....
And here it is:
You can read the full conversation here if you wish. It does get a little 'bitchy' though, so to speak.
I had planned to add my own views on @heimindanger's 'Operation Clean Trending' post the other day, and today's discussion with @therealwolf (as above), has brought this forward as this post would have overlapped with my reply on the thread linked above.
'Shine a bad light'
@therealwolf - If you feel that a reply would 'shine a bad light' on your service, then this speaks volumes in itself. You have answered my question honestly, whilst shooting yourself and your service in the foot.
If any other witness who develops/runs/delegates to a bid-bot service would like to try to shine a good light whilst answering the title of this blog, please do.
Whitelists/Blacklists have been mostly ineffective at stopping low quality posts from reaching Trending/Hot - they are just an excuse to write another post about how they are not doing an effective job at all.
When @steemitblog can't reach trending because a new Cryptokitty has been born, or an aging guitarist likes his leather jackets being on show a little too much, you know something isn't right.
When the owner of the the hottest decentralised application to hit the Steem Blockchain so far is making negative noises towards Bid-bots, you know there are issues ahead.
If @heimindanger chooses to take @dtube to another Blockchain because the content @dtube promote is nowhere to be seen in the 'Hot' and 'Trending' pages, it will be a monumental blow to STEEM.
@dtube are one of the Steem's flagship applications, we need the likes of these applications here, and we don't need your 'Smart' service at all.
Today I am removing all witness votes to accounts I can link to bid-bots.
I know at least one Witness who's given much to the minnows over the past year and so this decision was not easy, I hope they will understand.
Have a good weekend
Asher @abh12345
If you wish to vote for a witness who has no connections to bid-bots and can actually see further than their nearest bank, @steemcommunity is one of these, and you can do this here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses