I think they are motivated by short term profit over the well being and popularity of the platform leading to long term profit.
I addressed this point here. It's important to remember that we're looking at first generation bots. In the long run, the bots that succeed will be the ones that promote steem's long term value. A short list of things bots can do that human curators can't/won't:
- Judge all articles using a single, consistent standard.
- Mine statistical correlations between post content/metadata and steem value
- Work 24x7x365
- Level the playing field for authors between short posts which humans view quickly (10 memes per minute per human?) and longer posts which are time consuming to read manually (some longer posts can take 5-15 minutes to read carefully).
- Check for plagiarism
- Check for repeated posts
- Evaluate posts in multiple languages.
Of course there's more, but hopefully that gets the point across.
Whether it does it well or not at this point, I can tell you that the goal behind my own bot is to help raise steem's price by finding and supporting quality content. Curation rewards are a secondary consideration.
Update:* Reading through remaining comments. Up above, you asked about the early voting penalty before 30 minutes, and I don't think anyone answered. I couldn't respond to that comment because of the nesting limit, so here's a link - @cryptomental/steem-internals-10-payment-reward-system-demystified
Payment reward windows
The payment and how it is split depends on three payment reward windows:
First 30 minutes after a new post is submitted is called STEEMIT REVERSE AUCTION WINDOW. This is a time when the early votes receive a penalty. Please see below for the details.
30 minutes to 24 hours is the remaining time for the first payout window, the penalty for early voting is equal to 0.
30 days for the second payout window. Upvotes after 30 days do not bring any reward to the author anymore.
RE: Whales - Can the community buy out a portion of your influence?