The general consensus for using promotion services now is to decline rewards. Bot services are not quality oriented at all, they upvote what they are paid to upvote. 

There are better ways, such as the new Curangel project, and the HoboDAO project that we're building is a decentralized contest curation system that allows a group of human curators to decide the top 5 daily posts submitted to the HoboDAO for review and curation rewards. 

Contests and human curation services are ultimately a lot better of a system. However, if the bot services wish to continue, the community is recognizing that it is acceptable if rewards are declined. Ideally, #NewSteem should just embrace new human curation programs and give up on the idea of bot services, which is a point many outside commentators have criticized Steem for having.

I agree on the non-necessity of downvoting posts simply because they've been botted. Promotion is a perfectly valid use case for bid bots. In fact, it is the original use case and it is meant to increase demand for Steem Power.  Excessive use of bid bots or to just maximize ROI, the byproduct of which is the pushing of unworthy posts into Trending is grounds for relentless downvoting. But this particular post contains valuable information to those people who are not @aggroed's followers, too.

Don't agree with the "witch-hunting" name calling ;)

Promoting is fine. But the amount of the reward pool used for doing so still matters. People can find ways and places to do so that don't engender opposition from people such as myself who understand the systemic problems which can be caused by _too much_ promotion.

Trending is a scarce resource. The posts cycle maybe every 12-24 hours in most cases, which means there are maybe 5-10 slots per day at most (depending on screen size and UI of the viewer, but obviously higher is better). People can take a step back and be a bit circumspect about whether their content is not only useful, but really _one of the 5-10 most worthy_ of exposure on a given day _out of every single post on the entire platform_. I would submit in many cases the answer is no, _especially if other stakehodlers don't agree with the merit enough to give organic votes_.

Finally, too much promotion undermines what we are trying to do with encouraging people to invest in curatation initiatives. Not only does it reduce the reward pool (for both curators and authors) but it makes curation less effective and meaningful. Do you honestly believe that every one of those 5-10 daily slots should be filled by promotion, leaving none to be filled by honest curation? My second question would be _how many_ posts would you say are currently being heavily promoted daily and is this a healthy balance? I don't think so, not yet. So some push-back is healthy. 

So, no, I'm not flatly against promotion, in specific _special_ cases where the promotion is _exceptionally_ needed and useful, but it can easily be, and has been, drastically overused. Until that is no longer the case (or it becomes clear that EIP did not work and the dominance of paid voting and self-voting will remain the norm), I plan to continue applying some downvotes to encourage change.

#NewSteem on, mate!