RE: Building Mod-Bot: An experimental community moderation tool
Now I have taken the time to read your post a third time and I think I have understood everything (except the technical implementation of course)... ;-)
I admire your idea and how many details you think about. If such a bot works: Kudos!
Hm, maybe the tool is useful for some communities (better: their admins). It always depends on how you use the AI and how much personal energy you put into looking after and controlling it.
Here is my personal answer to your question whether someone would use this bot as admin of a community.
As fascinating as I find the possibilities and technical implementation as well as your competence - BUT, no, I would not use the bot.
Certain automatisms are okay and useful for me. But not for the evaluation of content via votes. For example, I would only follow a trail if I knew that the starting account really reads carefully and votes in my favour. To be honest, various - even very established - trails have already been eliminated for me. Chiller's "Follow Voter Function" is much better if you don't have time to vote. Here you can call up the votes of a user you trust and simply copy them (you can also omit individual votes if you don't agree with them).
Of course, your tool checks a lot of aspects, but in my opinion only a person can decide about the real quality (of course, this is often subjective) of a content.
I even think it's a bit "dangerous" to bring this automatism into connection with "promoted". To end up in this category, a contribution should be really good (after all, it should also be advertising for the Steem and set itself apart from all the "plagiarism and boring diaries"). Promising free slots on the basis of automatically read-out parameters seems to me like a lottery in which the cleverest or richest tricker can win again... :-(
The topic of automation is a whole big conversation, so I'll maybe write my thoughts on that in a future post. Short version, my opinion is that all tools can be used well or used badly, and that automation is just a tool that will get better with time. I agree that people will always seek ways to game the current iteration, but to me the solution to that problem is to make the next version better.
I'm not trying to change your mind, but just for clarity, mod-bot isn't actually voting for any posts. For now, it's just pinning and unpinning them - in keeping with my original idea to use post promotion for audience building. Also, there's a way to prevent pinning if a moderator finds that a post is plagiarized or spammy or whatever. The next phase is probably muting posts that don't meet a community's rules (although @cmp2020 is back at school now, so things might be slow). In the end, the moderator will have ultimate (manual) control over both pinning and muting.
Of course. With a lot of components to consider. I have already read many posts or comments from you regarding the automation of various processes on the Steem. Our opinions often diverge somewhat, but never completely. I don't demonise automation at all (especially since it simplifies a lot). But it has to be constantly maintained by real people.
E.g. the former plagiarism bot @cheetah. I liked him a lot... ;-) But at some point he started to strike as soon as he discovered a repetitive footnote. When I pointed this out, its operators did not remove the automatic downvotes. Worse still, the users ended up on a blacklist in case of repetition and had no chance of rehabilitation because the people responsible no longer cared about the bot.
I know @cheetah doesn't really fit the topic now, I just wanted to get away from the vote bot.... ;-)
Yes, I understood that. By pinning the articles (and thus making them important), he influences other voters indirectly at best (as your son already said). That's what promotion is for, advertising.
And here, I think, the selection has to be careful. Go beyond parameters and bring human considerations into play. But I'm certainly not accusing you/your son of not doing the latter!
That should be out of the question anyway. But for that, the mod has to control the articles. In that case, he could just pin them by hand... ;-)
This mod bot is going to be great and I think it's super cool that you're programming something like this! Try it out, evaluate it, declare it perfect or improve it. The best prerequisites... :-))
I reserve the right to decide against its use in my community at the moment - that's what @cmp2020 asked about.
I have a few "time problems" regarding my activity on the Steem. But I promise to keep this comment open and answer it later this week!
First of all, this project does not use any AI technology (it's basically just checking to see what the community's parameters either for pinning or posting are, and if the post fits them). Just clarifying that. Second of all, either way you will need to put energy into controlling something. If you are putting energy into controlling the bot, the bot will be saving you energy from having to filter the baseline violations in your community that are easy to automate.
The first thing I would point out in response to this: as @remlaps already addressed, this service would not be about voting. It's not a curation trail, and will not have much directly to do with curation. It may be indirectly related to curation because it may allow for curators to see posts that fit certain criteria that the community owner sets up which is appealing for the curator, but this project is not directly looking to curate.
At it's core, the pinning part of this project is about incentivizing post promotion and burning rewards. Both of these things are ways to improve the price of steem/sbd by decreasing the amount of currency that is being added to the market. Both of these things reflect value. Burning SBD for a post means you think that post will make more than the money you are burning. Burning a portion of the rewards shows that you value reducing the amount of steem being produced (and therefore improving the price of steem) more than you value the amount of steem you are burning.
To end up in the promoted category, one must promote a post. That is done at the blockchain level. So this product is completely unrelated to whether or not posts get promoted. What this product does is cycle through the posts that have been promoted to give them visibility. Like I said, my father and I thought this is useful because to promote a post, one effectively has to burn SBD. Similarly, burning a post means to burn the steem that post would have earned in rewards. Both of these things will improve the price of Steem.
Keep in mind that this and the other features in regards to pinning/muting are optional, and that one could solely use the pin part of the project or the mute part. They are a way of setting a baseline standard for a community either for pinning or simply posting in a community. If I as a community owner want the community to only have posts that are longer, I can set that up. And if I as an owner want shorter posts (like in the case of the steem links community), I can set that up. But the parameters would be up to the owner and subject to change at any time. Like my father said, mod-bot has commands so the community owner can make changes quickly if something goes wrong.
Overall, I think this product could really enhance Steem. For one thing, community owners won't have to do as much work to shape the community to be the way they want it to be. That's what automation means. Of course you are right that there wouldn't be as much freedom in judging content because the owner is not judging every article directly, but abstraction is a part of the world we live in, and a necessary one. Imagine if you chose to read Steem posts at the blockchain level instead of on an interface because there is more information conveyed at the blockchain level. Yes, by putting it on an interface, some information is inevitably filtered out by that interface, but the information displayed is much more pretty and readable and presented in a way that enhances the experience.
There's perks to doing things yourself as the owner, but it's also a lot more work. And sometimes you are inevitably doing something that's easily automated, and therefore wasting your own time for the freedom to judge post's individually on a case by case basis. If that is what you are looking to do, then this product may not be useful, but if you find yourself muting the same kinds of posts, or want to ensure the same standard for all the posts in your community, this product might be useful.
I have a few "time problems" regarding my activity on the Steem. But I promise to keep this comment open and answer it later this week!
Sorry, one more little addition using #penny4thouhgts as an example.
I love your dad's idea! #penny4thoughts is brilliant! And also this fantastic tool unfortunately gives possibilities for abuse. If you look at the hashtag, you see a user who publishes there two or three times a day with cheap posts. On the one hand, he is sure to get the vote of @penny4thoughts. On the other hand, he comments and votes himself with his second account in order to receive the bonus payment. Oh, yes, he's his only commenter.... ;-)
Then there are the users who specifically search for #penny4thoughts articles and leave some inappropriate comment hoping to get a few crumbs of the cake. For me that's shabby.
Conclusion: Bought engagement is very questionable for me, the spirit of Steem as it once was is getting more and more lost through automation.
I agree that penny4thoughts is a groundbreaking and brilliant idea. I think it should be a fundamental concept to Steem that, in an ideal world, would be optionally done by the blockchain itself.
All of steem is "bought engagement" to some extent. Most people are here for author rewards at this point (Lord knows they're not here for the ground breaking user interface or recommendations systems. Two things I'd like to see improved so Steem is less bought engagement). My father just made a different way of rewarding (by redistributing rewards) a specific type of engagement: that being discussion.
I have a few "time problems" regarding my activity on the Steem. But I promise to keep this comment open and answer it later this week!
With the necessary changes to curb exploitation, I thought this suggestion was great too!
This would make many users realize that interacting on this platform is incredibly important and that it can even be a little lucrative. Then "everyone" wouldn't feel "forced" to post articles at all costs, no matter how poor their content. Maybe the latter statement is a little unfair, but that's how it often feels with the "new generation" of Steemit users, unfortunately.
Respect @chriddi for both valuable comments and for sharing your thoughts.
May I ask you what is the idea behind this project? Or direct me to some post about it? I would appreciate it
Cheers Piotr
Thank you... 😊
Remlaps developed the project some time ago (I remember it's been active before the big fork) and I was not able to find its introducing post.
Maybe this dialogue might help you a bit:
https://steemit.com/games/@chriddi/rfw32z
Lucky 5"
Curated By - @ubongudofot
Curation Team - Team 4 Curators
Dankeschön... ;-)