RE: RE: Can Steemit Survive Burning $65 Million USD in Author and Curator Rewards Every Year?
Thank you for the response, @outtheshellvlog!
Let's imagine, Steemit wouldn't stop their operations even in the worst case scenario thanks to the volunteers. But if it loses its billion dollar market cap, it would lose its current appeal. Think about a billionaire losing all of their wealth and living on the mercy of the charity of others.
Moreover, you say that they have extra costs such as Amazon AWS, system administrators, and developers. Those have to be paid as well. I have an online project that is being used for years now. I make no money at all from that project. I have stopped the active development of it years ago. And every time I have to extend the domain name registration, I think twice if I should do it or just pull the plug on it.
Proof of Brain
This is an interesting concept for sure. I admit that I don't know much about it. If it could be implemented well, it could solve a lot of problems on Steemit, but again not all. And actually, it could introduce some problems as well.
Some abuse is detected by bots now. If bots are removed from the system, it would be difficult to catch as much abuse as we can now.
Bots can be used for benevolent reasons as well, such as those bots that comment your posts for milestone accomplishments. Those are encouraging people to participate more.
Moreover, it's also important how you implement this, because some genuine, innocent users could be trampled upon in the process. So, any ideas for implementation?
By the way, do you know a way of finding the mentions to one's Steemit handle besides the obvious search engine method?
Simplest solution: Bots that are beneficial such as the milestone bot, Cheetah and bots that attempt to curate and showcase others projects and the upcoming SteemPress bot, the simplest solution is to have a whitelist of bots that have to be approved before being hooked up. If not approved and whitelisted, the bot will be banned.
In regards to your website/project, I know the feeling. I operate a 501(c)3, charitable non-profit and had to let the .org domain go to save on costs.
I also have no way to tell if I've been mentioned or not, there needs to be a notification system here but there isn't.
Whitelisting some bots are a good idea.
Besides that, I have two concerns about banning bots.
The algorithm of those bots have to be designed very carefully.
Another concern is that some people can hire cheap labor from developing countries to replace the bots. Similarly, some people might just put in the work to manually abuse the system.
I'd argue that the majority of abuse comes from people using a bot that scrapes content based on certain keywords from google, others go a step further and use a spinner to try avoiding Cheetah then further still, voting bots.
You're right there will be false positives and misses. Not even my AI is capable of determining a bot or not. When Microsoft's Tay first went life and it ran into it, truly interesting conversations between those two. At least my bot's already went through the "Gas the kikes" phase, thanks Internet.