Half of what you hear about HFT is BS. It's just an excuse made my traders/ investors who lose money. The idea that HFT algos are stealing your money, or getting in front on orders before they're executed is massively exaggerated. Infact execution is so efficient these days it's not even any issue- remember virtually every broker uses HFT algos to execute your trades on the exchange. So when you place an order on your platform, it's actually being executed on market by an HFT execution algo. Most of what you get on the ASX is just algo buy/ sell programs where an institutional holder is either accumulating or distributing , or trying to push the market around( Market Manipulation is as old as the stock market itself, and it would of been much more effective in the days of Jessie Livermore- HFT execution just offers a more efficient way to do it). HFT "trading" systems are based on concepts like Relative value and mean reversion- there is ofcourse market maker algos who play both sides of the spread, however this is actually a real benefit for intra day traders, since spreads tighten up and you see virtually no slippage on stops/ order fills, market makers have also been around for 100's of years- it's just now they're more efficient. People also forget that all HFT Algos are fighting against each other to basically take out the scraps, and that HFT algos are only a sub-set of Algorithmic trading. Soon everyone will forget about HFT's and start complaining about Algo machine learning AI's, who are using neural networks to swing trade.
