Huh I guess I would strongly have to disagree that all automated voting is equivalent to paid vote services.
Services like Streemian and Steemauto and Steemvoter which allow users to automatically trail their votes either after a curation trail or a fan base trail (trail after a user's posting) are basically vote bots - they provide a web-front end so the average user can implement this, but there is no difference between those services and setting up a vote bot (fossbot for instance). And both of those things that I mentioned - curation trails and fanbase trails -are forms of automated voting that are vitally important to the success of this platform. What would you suggest somebody do who has a large stake of SP but does not have the time to vote manually? Delegate it all out (which yields zero returns for their investment)? Do you really think it is a bad thing if they choose posters that they know are quality posters and trail their vote after the posting automatically? Do you really think that supporting good manual curators by following their vote trail is a bad thing?
Proving your worth as a consistently good curator and parlaying that into getting a bunch of people to follow your curation trail is really the only way to make any kind of decent payout at all curating on this platform. The trailing votes add to the curation reward the initial curator gets.
I am speaking as a NOT-bot here, as I have 6 manual curators who vote for me (all 6 share my posting key) and every vote that has ever been cast by this account has been cast manually. I very much appreciate the good people who have put their trust in our curation by following the @r-bot curation trail and I can promise you that those automated trailing votes are doing the blockchain a world of good. Killing all automated voting is an incredibly shortsighted thing to propose.
Cheers - Carl "@r-bot" Gnash / @carlgnash
RE: The Difference Between Promotion and Curation, and Killing All Bots