Talking to a Bot
Yesterday I found myself talking to a bot. I suppose it was bound to happen. Bots DO talk to me now and then and this particular bot had congratulated me on a post well written, rewarded me with a decent upvote, AND left me a supportive comment.
I don't always appreciate bot comments. Take the haiku bot for example. I think the haiku bot is really bad at haiku and I would like someone to please turn that thing off. Sometimes I tell it so myself. Early on in my steem journeys I replied "stop" to the steemit bot because for months those were the only comments I ever got and they made me feel pathetic. Then there are the bots that respond and resteem and/or upvote simply because I used a particular tag, #oc for example. To these bots I say thank you.
Yesterday's bot is a bit different. @truffflepig, as I understand it, is run by an algorithm that evaluates a post by looking at overall structure and whether there are varied sentence types or not, measuring proper English grammar and spelling, and counting up uses of a variety of adjectives and verbs. If all of these are present the piece of writing is considered likely to present as a cohesive whole. I appreciate The Truffle Pig, who has visited me and pronounced my work of value a number of times now. The Truffle Pig has, however, always thought my posts should make WAY more than they finally do in payout.
Yesterday the Truffle Pig bot visited this post, a freewrite that I like a lot: https://steempeak.com/freewrite/@owasco/climber-a-freewrite
@trufflepig had deemed yet another of my VERY low payout works to be of value. Here's what I said back:
I totally agree! I write great original stuff off the cuff with the help only of a couple of prompts. Then I edit it. Then I proofread it and proofread it again and again and again. Then I choose, crop, tinker with and upload a photo that I took myself. Then I make sure to give credit wherever credit is due. I hit publish and start the mad scramble to get it noticed - I'm my own marketer, manager and promoter too. I do all this work and does anyone notice? The answer to that is YES! This thing has been resteemed four times! It has gotten at least fourteen human readers who took the time to comment! But has it made any steem? Nope. All this talk about quality being rewarded and I haven't even made a quarter on this excellent post. OK OK, I know I still got to surprise the hell out of myself by writing a really good story, one that is tight enough to get the attention of a bot like yourself that can see it is well constructed and has careful and adept grammar. But the story also has a true surprise ending (read the comments to see what people were thinking as opposed to my brilliant twist ending), an ending that rivals even a @felt.buzz ending. People who read it genuinely liked it because they are folks who are out there doing exactly the same kind of work I am doing and racking up quarter after quarter, being careful to stake it all back into the steem system that is making others rich. OK not rich maybe, but rich in steem and power on the steem blockchain. There are days I feel like I am doing all this mostly to benefit an elite techno-savvy math-minded gambling class. My work, after all, goes up in smoke in a couple of days but the money makers get to keep their money. It gets a bit demoralizing to have to work this hard (writer, editor, proofreader, photographer, lay out artist, publisher, marketer, and chief bottle scrubber) for next to nothing, except of course for visits from my dear readers who keep me sane. I'd like to express my endless gratitude to everyone who actually reads my stuff.
Hey, I know I am talking to a bot, but thanks for giving me the opportunity to get all this off my chest.
@freewritehouse has been a tremendous support to me in the past and I am very devoted to it. I feel the recent hardfork has harmed communities that support the smaller accounts, those of us who are here to learn as much as if not more than we are here to prove ourselves. But you will not be read unless you have something to give, and the upvote curve wiped us out in that department. Why do I never hear anyone discussing the upvote curve? Discussion about downvotes is all the rage, but they have not harmed me in any way. That upvote curve surely has. Rant over.
Thank you so very much for reading.
All images are my own unless otherwise stated. This one is of a painting by Chris Randolph of the Living Museum
Here is a bot command you will probably like :)
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 5/15)
Oh yes I do very much! Thank you for reading it!
You're welcome :)
I love truff for some reason lol. Haiku bot I agree is not the greatest. It makes for a good laugh every now and then though.
Your blog is looking very nice, keep up the great work!
oh my gosh I am plotzing over here from the instant appreciation. thank you.
You summoned all the bots!
Look who else showed up 👇😂
You mean tts? I don't know how to stop jerry banfield, I know he is frowned upon but I actually found his newsletter informative. I learned that I am NOT tipping my masseuse too much for instance. I unsubscribed from the poor fellow's newsletter after newsteem so as not to incur any wrath, but I also thought he was just making the most of the situation, I never understood why he was so reviled for giving a Little a few cents here and there. Thank goodness for Jerry Banfield or my last post would have made 10% even less.
Yes, I've found it amusing a couple of times that Haiku Bot has made haikus . . . of my own haikus, which is odd to say the least.
But I love Trufflepig, not least because I have a cat named Truffle. Nice symmetry.
That said, my husband talks to bots all the time, out loud in his truck, especially late at night when he's bored or sleepy.
His favorite is asking Google to tell him a joke, which are usually groaners, but occasionally hilarious. He also asks Google nonsensical questions, that have no real answer, and the responses are often hilarious.
So it's not just you. ;-)
And then, of course, there's James Veitch, who seems to take responding to spam male and email bots to an art form:
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_veitch_this_is_what_happens_when_you_reply_to_spam_email?language=nb
That video cracked me up! If only truffle would respond! I confess I was hoping he would. Maybe that could be one of the changes I recommend to improve steem in that contest I've seen going around.
To increase user time devoted to steem with minimal to no reward, I propose we release a swarm of bots with conversational skills.
Something to that effect.
Sounds like it would be a worse time waster than Candy Crush, lolol!
Seriously, though, or not, Google's responses can be absolutely hilarious.
I'm not into giving them any data I don't have to, but I'm all in for messing with them. Turn about's fair play, after all.
;-)
Posted using Partiko Android
hahaha the image of you guys messing with google chat, or google gab or whatever is very funny! Good times! Almost makes me want to get me some spy technology listening in on me too. Definitely fair play.
I also saw that this was seven days ago, so will be upvoting another of your posts.
To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.
Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.
I am not a bot 😎do you mean the author reward when talking about the upvote curve? I don't think many people mind because the reward pool is being distributed. I am trying as hard as I can to stay out of the politics but they make it pretty rough. I don't see how we will ever get any new people on steemit. I am glad you're still here though!
Posted using Partiko iOS
Hello again! Thank you for appreciating me!
By upvote curve I mean the way my 100% upvote, which should be .014, is only .006 on a post that is making under $2. It seems a post I upvote needs to make $50 or more before my upvote registers at its full value. Go check it out! Your upvote on my post gave me and my curators .049 instead of the .071 your profile says it should have been. As the earnings on a post go up, so does the value of your vote. It's difficult for low payout posts to get out of the 0 range if only the likes of me upvote it. So my money is not buying what it used to. I sit here for hours of every single day curating, and average .50 steem power a day in earnings for it. It's so low in part because I support mostly the Littles, but also because my vote value has been, essentially, halved.
I sit here for hours of every single day curating,
and average .50 steem power a day in earnings for it.
You should be writing!
I know, I know, if we don't upvote/curate other, nobody will read us.
But you should be writing.
Haiku bot is everywhere. Haiku bot nabs my replies all the time. Haiku bot ignores my actual haiku's. I am unimpressed with Haiku bot too.
It's always nice to get a reply from an actual living human being. I'd even be happy with getting a reply from a dead human being! I'm not terribly picky.
lol!
hahahaha!!! Could not agree more!
This post was curated by @theluvbug
and has received an upvote and a resteem to hopefully generate some ❤ extra love ❤ for your post!
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Thank you dahlink!
haha! Howdy owasco! I bet that bot never got a response like yours! The response deserved another Trufflepig vote and comment!
I was hoping it would respond. Now I talk back to that bot whenever it visits me. It inspires me. Last time I asked it to explain what 3 SBD would look like in the reward field. I can not figure out how what I'm told the post will make translates into what I finally actually get in steem and sp. Do you know? Now I suspect The STU seems to be in US dollars, multiplied by the SBD price du jour, and divided by the steem token price du jour to arrive at the steem we actually see in our wallets. But just when I think I've got this figured out, a post comes along and defies it. I have a whopping .51 STU coming in today, which by those calculations should render me 1.27 steem for my wallet. We'll see later today. Thanks for listening and if you know the answer to this mystery, please let me know.
Howdy today owasco! No, I never paid any attention to what that bot says, I just laughed and said yeah right! Because it never works that way. I don't really do math, I'm kind of dyslexic when it comes to math. Mrs. J is really good at that so I go to her to figure things out. lol.
But if you figure it out you should do a post about it!
I agree with you, especially on the haiku bot, and I see that one a lot. I think its mission may be badly defined, lol. I don't think I've ever gotten a a truffle pig message/upvote, but I've seen them on others' posts every now and then.
Though there are some who I've seen land on steemit that are well-known on the internet, or they know a whale here on steemit, and their rep goes over 50 on their first day. It's a popularity contest on a grand scale, I think. Takes lots of time and energy for most of us.
You've got oodles of talent; just keep hanging on for dear life! You'll get there, I'm sure! :)