I'm very glad to see this being addressed. I just wrote an article about it a couple of days ago.
https://steemit.com/busy/@jeezzle/the-truth-about-bidbots
I lost about 16 Steem on this post. https://steemit.com/busy/@jeezzle/the-dark-crystal-even-better-than-you-remember
That had been upped by 154 Steem.
By my calculations I should have actually made 50 Steem.
If you read that post you will see that I made the decision to never promote a large post again because it simply isn't worth it. I did also come to conclusion that the calculations for Steem at the time of the original post would have been listing at $0.40 even though I took several snapshots of the actual prices for everyday and included them in that post and you can see that they are all between $0.34 and $0.30. So where did it pulled out $0.40 from? It seems like it simply pulled it out of thin air in order to screw us.
You didn't lose any STEEM. The correct amount of STEEM was paid out but some of the UIs displayed it incorrectly.
If that's the case then all of the bidbots were serious miscalculating the information about the ROI.
The ones that I used promise a no more than negative 10% ROI, worst case.
10% of 154 is. 15.4
I lost 16.
Additionally, I received upvotes on that post from several accounts in the amount of at least 10 Steem, making the ROI way off base. Assuming what you have said is the absolute truth. then a significant error occurred somewhere along the line.
I've been posting on Steemit everyday since 2016. I never lost as much as I have the few times that I used Bidbots during this particular time period. It was enough to put me right off them. People say it just has to do with the way that amounts are displayed but spending 154 Steem and getting 138 back after spending about two hours making a post which would have made a few dollars on it's own without a Bidbot..... it's basically made a situation which I will never again advocate their use. Too big of a loss. All based on UI? I guess you know more about it than I would, but as someone that has been here for a couple of years posting every single day I'd say that making loss like that is completely outside the scope of my routine. It won't happen again.
Yes I agree the bidbots may have been getting it wrong. Those are not part of the blockchain, but it is still unfortunate that they were (are?) malfunctioning.