Any account with a positive reputation, including bots and yourself, will move your reputation rating upward. Frequency of the voting, percentage of the vote given, the SP behind it, all factor in. For that reason it's difficult to say how much or how little it's changing. The point is, it does.
In other words, instead of your reputation score being influenced solely by human curators, you influence it with a self-upvote, and a voting bot does, too. In my mind, that makes the reputation score a less of a big deal than what I believed it to be. If you can influence your own score to whatever degree, then why have one?
Especially when there doesn't appear to be a consensus about the worth of reputation on Steemit. There are those who swear by it, and there are those who think it does little to tell anything meaningful about an author or their content.
(If I had to guess, I would say using bots at the beginning would move your reputation faster, but that you would have to increase the amount of bot use and the percentage of use in order to continue fast reputation change. However, a person with a large SP or delegation could also move the reputation upward through self-upvoting. Combined, the reputation moves that much more.)
Because the self-upvote is generally immediate, a curator won't see anything from it. Bots upvoting at the maximized for profit moment with enough vote weight and power behind it will beat a human curator. Bots stacked one after the other will freeze them out completely.
Now, I realize that depending on the number of human upvotes you get, and their weight, they might still have a greater influence on your reputation as well as your author rewards. But what are human curators getting out of it if the bots freeze them out? You'll have to be a fairly large account yourself in order to gain any curation reward.
So, I don't know. The more I learn about these practices, the less I like them.
I also continue to wonder how the masses are going to react. With well over 500,000 of 760,000-plus accounts inactive, I think we already have a good idea. If Steemit or Busy or any other platform is not fun and easy to use, as well as truly social and profitable enough, people leave the platforms for whatever works better.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. Things need to change. I'd rather it not be a hardfork. I'd rather change come from us, because then it will be permanent, rather than too many of us trying to figure out the next workaround.
