Will Steemit become nothing but a bot battleground?
It seems like slowly but surely Steemit is turning into a battle of bots. You have "helpful" bots that try to fight against spam, Others try to prevent plagiarism and ensure original content. Still others look for duplicate content. Then you have many harmful bots. The biggest of these are the spam bots that just try to comment on every post. Others send messages only to certain posts in attempts to steal curation rewards.
What you eventually end up with is bots battling bots. Slowly people will be pushed away as the bots steal rewards and bury threads with invalid flags. Eventually all that may be left are bots trying to get steem power off of other bots.
So I put to you my conclusion that all bots are bad bots. Steemit has the ability for people to decide content and deal with bad content. We don't need bots to do this and we definitely don't need bots spamming. The real question is what can be done to keep all bots off of Steemit and make it a place for people? I hope someone comes up with a solution to this before only bots are left.
Some bots are good and i can see their usefulness. No matter how many people there are on steemit, they cant pay attention to every post made, but @cheetah does...
Yes, boots are good. :D
Shut up!! I just woke up and need more coffee ahahahaha
You wont let me live this down will you ?
Of course I will, eventually...
Damn it ! Lol
and this Ladies and Gentlemen is the birth of SkyNet.
No the blockchain was this is just another step closer.
In seriousness, Steem(it) could allow users to set:
a) minimum karma to reply to a post
b) fee to reply to a post
Decent ideas but for new users starting they wouldn't necessarily know about those options and would attract bots like blood attracts sharks. Instant bad experience and loss of new content creators.
You could have the minimum karma one as a default setting.
What is karma going to be based on? If it's base don steem power that can be bought and the bots can earn it.
Total vote count, including weight. It's gonna be pretty hard for the annoying bots to maintain an overall positive karma, especially the really prolific ones. I just hope it can be done in a computationally inexpensive way for nodes (I don't see any reason why it can't, there shouldn't be a need to recount every time).
I can see a way around it. The bot just needs to set it's vote karma to 0 and have other bots upvote it so it can vote.
Simple, we'll just sign our transactions with proof of human.
Well, i do support some bots. The cheetah bot and wang are great, but those spammers that only post crap have to go
Still even if they get it right 99% of the time that 1% can bury some great content and really piss people off.
Since the blockchain is public, anyone create a bot attack/help the system. Hopefully the good bots can beat the greed bots or at least neutralize them.
Even if that is true there will be a lot of casualties in the process.
looks like it
You can't really stop bots. Like you can't stop spam, plagiarism, insider trading, crime, infidelity, and the list goes on.
People who are skilled in the trade love to make bots because they can and because they can gain some kind of reward in it. Making a stand saying we must stop bots is going to do practically nothing.
Bots are all over the real Internet and it seems to be working fine. Yes the owners of sites have to mitigate against bots and certainly should steemit but the problem will always be there. Never going away.
If you go to http://piston.readthedocs.io/en/develop/ one of the command line tools for steem they even give you a simple explanation on how to build a bot. Bots are like guns they are as good or bad as the programmer who uses them.
Keep up the good work!
As the article stated: just a bot!
A very annoying one at that.
Don't know whether to flag or upvote you for irony.
Really it does prove my point rather well though.