the voting system is severely broken and the Trending page is near-meaningless.

We agree but I still feel witnesses need to keep a tab on it.

I disagree. I see them as grossly overrewarded.

Many time no profit is generated from the bidbot. It's a zero-sum game many times.

It's also not very intuitive to use them and know how much $ total we bought and how much organic we'll receive. Ironically buying votes will very often discourage people to vote on a post because they feel it's too rewarded or because it didn't generate its views organically. It's a catch 22.

I used to post once a week working 20-30 hours on a post and even more and would still get flags sometimes even if I wouldn't buy votes as it didn't exist. I wasn't acting the way I was acting for the money back then and I'm still not. If I was back then, I would have split my gigantic post into smaller posts and would have made more money for the exact same amount of work.

I get your point and I'm not here to attract negative energy between the 2 of us or anyone. I'll obviously try to be more careful. I respect your choice and opinion. It's not about the $ that you're returning to the pool even though it's not negligible. There's more important to me, like how people perceive me and how I feel about myself from the way I act.