I wouldn’t say auto upvoting is inherently bad - if someone needs a little artificial boost to get started, that’s their choice.

Oh, I mean all auto-voting. Not just the use of bidbots but curation trails and everything else. I've seen some extremely interesting authors who were so good when they signed up. Then they became moderator of a community and with that, some auto-votes from a curation trail. It went from extremely interesting to 3 or 4 photos of their food every day. Whilst this user wasn't buying votes, she'd sold her soul.

When we were in a curation team (steemcurator0x), I created @curator-helper which would scan for active posts with particular tags, sorted by my algorithm and that hadn't already been voted for by one of the steemcurator accounts. I don't run it very often but it's a good way to find new content that I might be interested in. I've just run it so take a look and see if there's anything you like 🙂

I have nothing against them, I know a few who are nice and sensible. I just wish they would engage a little rather than just upvote.

They do every now and again and it's so nice. But then it's as though somebody in Beijing saw what they were doing and makes them stop! And then just like that, they're gone again.