I started to write a comment but it ended up being longer than initially planned so I am posting my response to a post so more people can see it.
The question by @inquiringtimes is "Please share what you feel is acceptable use of voting bots".
As most people know, I run @buildawhale and the Curation Digest so I will have a biased opinion but I also believe in my opinion.
Bots are promotional tools, every platform I have ever seen has advertising and promotional services. When I write a post on Facebook within a few hours I get a message "Your post is performing better than 95% of the posts on this page, do you want to boost it?".
The problem stems from the quality of content that is the norm on Steemit. Because it is so easy to game the system, the majority of the content is spam and low effort. It is extremely difficult to stop this completely and requires a lot of manual labor and automation can only help to some degree.
Then you have the fact most people using bots do it purely for the ROI and expects to make money doing it. I have never seen an industry where you can send money to someone to advertise your product, get advertising, then get paid back more than you paid immediately. This is the expectation here though. This isn't just coming from the fact I am a bot owner, although that does give me a bias, it is what mentality it creates when people create and submit content. Add in the SBD boost it has gotten exponentially worse.
I (@buildawhale) have been devoting hours daily trying to stop abuse and eliminate the garbage that gets rewarded by the use of my bots. I have noticed a dramatic increase in quality and it has made doing our daily Curation Digest easier but it is far from great. As fast as one user or network is stopped, another springs up behind it.
With the price of SBD, there are more and more bots created on a daily basis, and everyone is selling their vote now. The broken peg is creating a mentality and culture that rewards and encourages greed and minimum effort.
When I started @buildawhale I started with 20,000 Steem Power with my own cash, at the time it wasn't a big deal 133 Steem/week. I quickly doubled my lease every week and got progressively deeper into Steem until I hit around 2M Steem Power.
For the first couple of months, I lost money, the rent was just too high and the return wasn't as good people thought. There were a few bots that were heavily used (BellyRub & Booster) but for the most part, it was a struggle to even come close to break even. At one point I was at $40,000 USD/week and it was coming down to the last hours of the week to see if I could break even. I always paid up front and out of pocket for my Steem Power putting more money on the line each week than I made from all previous weeks combined.
I eventually got a better deal on Steem power and then the SBD boost happened. That changed everything, the amount of spam and low effort content created and submitted to @buildawhale was legendary. From the beginning of @buildawhale, I wanted to encourage quality content and not just submitting low effort content to get an upvote worth more than submitted. To do this I ran a daily curation publication similar to OCD to encourage and reward quality content.
I now spend a lot of time finding large spam networks and abusers and preventing them from being able to benefit from paid upvotes, at least from my bots. Unfortunately, they just use another, and boy there are others. Quality is subjective and I frequently know something is spam or low quality but I have to ignore it because I just can't prove it or there are much bigger abusers to tackle. When I do identify abusers, I am almost always flagged in retaliation or have to deal with tons of comments/messages asking to be removed.
As for directly answer your questions.
Are you less likely to vote on a post if it has lots of paid votes?
No, my criteria are heavily focused on time/effort, thought, originality, and of course if I like the person. Let's be honest, what you think of someone has a big factor in the equation regardless if you chose to admit it.
What is "Quality Content?"
You define that, let me know! I'll write a script to make detecting spam and shitposting a lot easier. This is one of the biggest issues I have trying to decide if someone needs to be added to the blacklist. I find myself very critical of content in general, and I find a lot of content low quality and low effort but I find I have to restrain myself to only choose things that I believe without a doubt is spam/abuse.
To me, the effort is a huge part of quality, just copying some article, copy pasting, creating a meme does not represent quality. I love memes, and I create them all the time, and they are great content, but as is sharing articles and videos. These are things I miss about Reddit, you could do this freely as there was no reward tied to every action.
With Steem, it all comes down to money. Every post, comment, and vote is rewarded. It has created a gold rush to produce as much content as humanly possible and gain the highest amount rewards as quickly as possible. Some do this by trying to create things I think people will enjoy and find interesting, some find the easiest way to create things that can be voted on and won't get flagged.
I think the only solution to this problem is to make posting low effort content more difficult and the penalty much harsher. We are on a decentralized platform without any form of authority. Abuse and spam will always exist, as it does on every platform. Without a way to stop it efficiently and quickly, and with a large penalty, it will just continue to thrive.
Does the timing of the vote purchased matter to you?
Yes and no. In itself, no not at all. But that doesn't mean this isn't being abused. I know some people like @acidyo who purposely wait till the end to give people the most time to get curation rewards, he doesn't buy votes though, but it is a mentality shared by some (although I think this is a very small minority that does it).
Before @grumpycat came around, I already had a discussion with other bot owners about reducing the max age. Prior to this discussion, I have to admit the thought never crossed my mind. The scenario of people voting at the last second to hide from flags wasn't something I thought of. Most people complaining they missed the 6 day 12-hour deadline and trying to offer good customer service I tried to make the window as close as possible so there is minimum chance they will mess up.
After the discussion months ago with other bot owners, I came to realize this attack vector and decided I would change the max age to 5 days. Unfortunately, I took a while to do this, I was doing refunds manually and the bot tracker made it difficult to change things as it created a huge flood of refunds as people adjusted. Then @grumpycat came around and made it a real problem. I immediately changed to 5 days as I completely agreed but didn't want to deal with a week of manual refunds 20-50 a day while people got used to it. The software to do auto refunds that linked to the Bot Tracker was too buggy and I didn't trust it and didn't want to put everything I worked for on it. I puckered up and changed the time to 5 days and manually did hundreds of refunds while people adjusted.
It didn't matter, @grumpycat didn't see it or care (mainly because it isn't one person) and I was attacked personally because I stood up and said my piece when others wouldn't. I stood firm because although I believed it needed to be done, I wasn't sure if 3.5 days, 5 days, or even 4 days was the right number and it was clear there was no way to reason or have a civil discussion about it. I stayed at 5 days for a long time and eventually changed it to 3 days, I have far better things to do than to argue with a brick wall and I didn't want to see more people flagged. It wasn't spammers getting flagged in the process, it was people @grumpycat considered "quality posts" and wanted to do damage. I also got tied up in the fact he was upvoting his comments endlessly and was doing more abuse than almost all my users combined. I agreed with the message but not the delivery.
I do believe the majority of late votes are abusive and it is why I ultimately changed it. It isn't 100% of the case though, but most legitimate votes do happen in the first couple of days and in the end that's the important thing.
How much is TOO MUCH?
Hell if I know, too much what? Too many paid votes, too many rewards?
I think this goes directly back to quality. I wrote a post a while ago that I frequently link You are not entitled to an audience, you need to earn it! because it goes to a root problem I find with Steem. Everyone believes their content is top quality, and just by doing so, they should be showered with upvotes. This mentality is extended to bot usage as well.
With the price of SBD the way it is and the rewards gained by posting, it is something that everyone is taking advantage of right now. While it is great for getting people to the platform, it is creating a very unhealthy economy that isn't sustainable.
Not sure if I rambled on or provided good answers to the questions, but it is how I feel.