About Bots and Social Mining
A few days ago I got asked the following question by @novacadian:
“Just working my way through the witness list at steemian.info and have one question, @chitty. Do you, as a witness, support vote bots?”
Well, the short answer is Yes but I would like to expand on that answer and also differentiate types of bots and what they bring to the table.
Upvote Bots
In the early days of Steem we struggled to find value in Vested Steem (Steem Power), there was no real reason to hold except the small benefits you could obtain from curation and by voting for yourself, which is probably in the same moral ground as buying votes.
The whole phenomenon of vote buying has added a steady demand for Steem that comes from dolphins and whales who seek profit by locking away their Steem and selling their votes.
In this sense, vote buying has Direct Market Impact by adding demand and shortening the supply of Steem. There is no doubt in my mind that banning or prohibiting vote bots will generate a massive sell-off in the market.
But there is also other benefits of vote bots, in one hand you have the marketing aspect. Buying votes provides exposure to unseen posts, all platforms like instagram, twitter or Facebook offer similar services, where your posts can be ranked higher if you pay those companies, difference is that in Steem you are paying other token holders, is a new form of Decentralized Marketing.
The other aspect that has really kicked in is the Gamification of vote-buying. We now find people playing with bots, finding the best time to put in their bids, sending SBD to different bots, making excel sheets of the possible returns, etc. Just by looking at the active user base of @minnowbooster you can see the success of voting bots in the platform.
Comment bots and Social Mining
We also have another set of bots that I would like to call Social Mining Bots. This bots pretend to obtain part of the reward pool by sending automated messages to the Blockchain.
To illustrate how easy and fast you can create one of these bots, I took 2 minutes of my time to write this code:
import random
first = ["this", "the", “your"]
second =["photo", "picture", "pic", "shot", “snapshot"]
third = ["is", "looks", "feels", "is really”]
fourth = ["great", "super", "good", "very good", "good", "wow","WOW", "cool", "GREAT","magnificent", "magical","very cool", "stylish", "beautiful", "so beautiful","so stylish", "so professional", "lovely", "so lovely", "very lovely", "glorious","so glorious", "very glorious", "adorable", "excellent", “amazing"]
fifth = [".", "..", "...", "!", "!!", "!!!"]
print (random.choice(first) + " " + random.choice(second) + " " + random.choice(third) + " " + random.choice(fourth) + random.choice(fifth))
If you add the outcome of this python script to all comments under the photography tag you would get a large combination of spammy comments:
the snapshot is really beautiful.
This picture is really magnificent..
the picture is really so stylish.
Now, I am not in the “right and wrong” business, Instagram is invaded with these photography bots and nobody complains about it. What I can say is that they certainly don’t add any value to the platform. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we should prohibit or ban these bots, I am a true believer of maximum freedom, if you don’t like these comments on your posts, just flag them, I certainly do.
Utility Bots
Utility Bots are those that provide some value to the users. For example, the anti-spam bots, the twitter reader bot, a price poster bot, and so on.
These bots I not only support but I enjoy building. They are in the eyes of many the “good bots”, even tho they are also doing their fair share of social mining and taking part of the reward pool, which is ok, people who build cool stuff should be rewarded for it.
This is exactly spot-on in my opinion and it's the same message I have been trying to spread regarding the state of voting bots on the platform.
There are definitely some issues with how the system works right now - both with voting bots and the Steem platform in general. Many people see those problems and just think that getting rid of voting bots altogether is the solution. In my opinion that's both not really possible and wouldn't actually solve anything even if it were.
Instead my approach has been to identify and try to fix the issues while simultaneously improving and increasing the value that voting bots provide to the platform.
I only saw this post because it has used voting bots to promote it, and now I've upvoted it, followed @chitty, and also gave him my vote for witness. This is both a great post and a great example of how voting bots provide significant value to publishers on the platform by increasing their visibility and helping them increase their following and earnings.
Did you guys forget about the "promote" function intended for that purpose? A hard-fork could fix it so we don't need bots for that. Meanwhile you are doing a great job.
Thank you Yabap, I am a big fan of your work, you have made bot votes available to the masses so your words mean a lot
This could be a new way of doing social media marketing, instead of going through the central administration of the platform, the marketing investment is doing through the users... think about it.
Completely agree!
A very large explanation of mass mining
It is of great benefit but we must be patient
Really great article
Thank you!
So far theres a few favorites ive done well on, with rate of return, but ive yet to figure out why some are winners and some are losers.
I thought I understood the system somewhat, until I made a expensive (at least to me) 8.0 steem bet, and got 77% of the bidding pool at the tail end of the pool, thinking I would get 77% of the vote pool of 49 dollars, when I ended up instead getting about $0.50 less then what I bid not to mention taking into account the 25% curation loss. so I'm very confused why the Estrada bot got me that and other bots where I put a dollar in and I get three times The return with only 17 percent of the voting pool. I would think the more you risk and the higher percent of the total voting pool percent the more you get returned, but it didn't work out that way.
Im using the bid bot tracker tool, and im keeping personal tabs on which bots ill never use again.
I dont mind so much the bots that leave comments, also because i see the importance of it in full disclosure. To me, the more data the better in order to maximize effectiveness and understanding especially when new to how the system works, or doesn't work.
Have you tried using Steembottracker.com ? , it tells you in advanced what you return will be and it also displays bots that have been capped so you don't lose money after curation.
Yeah, i was using it, that's why i was confused. Probably user error, but there was plenty of room left to bid, i got mine in on time, and it seemed those who bid before me had a better roi. Bid bot tracker has been extremely helpful though. Oh wait, my mistake, no i haven't used steembot tracker. Ill check it out, thanks!
Bots are HUGE on steemit. It seems like steemit is 50-90% "automated" although if you consider the work that goes into buying the bot votes then it might be under 50%. Even real users are often using autovoters and basically becoming humanoid bots. lol
Thanks very much for such a detailed reply, @chitty.
My interest in Utility Bots has me familiarizing myself with python and python-steem. Most Utility Bots seem to be a positive feature of the platform.
It is when voting becomes automated that has my concern.
You got a 50.00% upvote from @dailyupvotes courtesy of @hcf27!
Please upvote this comment to support the service.
I mostly agree with you, and I would add that what we are lacking is some filtering functionality in the front end apps, like steemit and busy, which permits the users to follow thousands of steem accounts and at the same time build some kind of lists of favorites, or classify them with some criteria. That would make the 'wall' more meaningful, useful and enjoyable. I'm thinking on developing a new blogging interface for steem network which would address this issue, I'm still learning the steem python library and the framework which I would use to build the app. But I hope Busy will improve this way too.
Wow! Great and amazing post.
Excellent explanation about Bots and Social Mining.
Very well articulated.
Nice content.
Good job sir.
You highlighted the key points which is really very important to know.
Thanks @chitty for sharing this post. 🤗💙
Upvoted + resteemed your post.
Please check my related article on the topic. (spanish)