Response to @dantheman "notice-to-bot-spammers"

@dantheman I moved this response from your blog to mine, because I realized that it was too long to read comfortably in your blog and thus didn't belong. Makes a better blog post anyways. Excessively short and excessively long comments are both serious problems whether they come from people or bots.

As for everyone else, I'm going to ask you to hear me out and if you disagree, do not flag this. Instead I ask you to please comment thoughtfully and respectfully or at least don't flame and troll here, so that others can comment.

Hopefully I'm not jumping in too late for my voice to be heard.

I know this is going to sound like I support spambots, but if you consider what I'm saying here, you'll realize I support fixing the problems the right way.

Truthfully I'm explaining the only option that produces a permanent solution because anything else is just an arms race.

@dantheman literally in terms of upvotes you have been my #1 upvoter, during my time here, but always on my commentary never on my postings and I appreciate that. It lets me know you listen.

This is why I'm talking right now, you've appeared to appreciate my insights in the past and I'm hoping you'll take this rather long winded set of insights into consideration.

@dantheman Bottom line...
What you are planning to do is going to make your bot problem much, much worse.

Here's why your solution does not actually work.

As I discussed here...
STEEMBOTS

You are thinking like a programmer and while I can respect that, it's that way of thinking that is causing you to miss why the bots will stay. You need to understand why they are here before you can fix the problem. You need to understand that you are treating the symptoms instead of curing the disease.

You have two types of users here right now.

Those who are here because they believe in steemit's long term future /me raises hand. We will call these owners. Then you have those who view this like it's just a game and are not vested at all in it's future. We'll call these guys larpers because to them it's just a role playing game.

Larpers comprise ALL of your catfish, ALL of your identity thieves, ALL of your plagiarists and an outsized fraction of the user base in general, but only 2% of your bot builders.

Everyone, seriously just stop upvoting on #introduceyourself unless you personally know the person, or people vouching for them and the first problem solves itself, most of the abusive larpers will go away because it's too much effort for little to no pay.

If you want to welcome someone, welcome people you actually know, by inviting them in and then you take the initiative to introduce us to them. It's not spam to go around saying hello to everyone.

Anyways, whether you are an owner or a larper; Unless you have substantial sums of money invested, you already lack much of the economic incentive to be here and frankly it's really hard to get non-geeks onto this platform,

@dantheman & @ned You need to treat all of your players, as though this is the ultimate role playing game and you're the dungeon master.

So understand that while well intentioned; Your "fix" for this botspam problem, provides a direct financial incentive for swarms to form and attack low and mid value targets. It encourages griefers to hold the reputation of your other players for ransom.

It also means a "protection and defense" racket will crop up. Because the solution relies on votes of bots to regulate bots. But it will impact people far more than it will the bots. Disagree with someone? Your conversations are suddenly sent to /dev/null no one will see you. No one will appreciate you. You will feel isolated. You will feel alone. You will leave. Thus the only real market that can emerge is one in which people sell their voting power on external platforms. Only actual spammers have a financial incentive to pay this right now but...

This means that dolphins and minnows alike are going to get stung to death while floating amidst an unending sea of jellyfish as soon as they begin to matter enough to matter. Which is right about the time you will see a mass exodus to a more rewarding "game".

The players doing this have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

It's a rules problem.
This "stake based voting" is an interesting experiment", and it has a lot of potential.
And yet

it's horrifically unbalanced as a ruleset!

Anyone who considers building a bot for personal enjoyment, looks at the ruleset and figures "I'm too small to matter, so no one will care what I do here. No one I know IRL is here anyways".

This is happening right now and already degrades the user experience dramatically. The reduced price of steem from people fleeing the platform after a big payday and selling at any cost ($0.83 USD / SBD are you freakin kidding me?).

The cheap steem dumping has allowed the number of bad bots to increase in number. If this continues, eventually their owners will be able to hold the entire platform to ransom, even the whales.

Why? Because to the people you're dealing with; This is just a game, nothing more. They have nothing to lose... They just need to cash out while they still can.

Some of them are also actually trying to make a statement about the power the masses can assert over those who consolidate for themselves too much power.

In otherwords, what you are seeing is your villagers saying we need our bread and circuses and a good dungeon crawl or dammit or we'll burn Rome to the ground!

When you look at this from your average larper's perspective, this is a game with a seriously unblanced ruleset. You want to stop their attempts to burn this place to the ground, you need to change the rules slightly so the balance is in their favor or at least feels that way.

Not in a manner that will punish your players (even the bad ones), but to incentivize good behavior more than the bad so the chaotic evil bad guys come over to the lawful good side. Because right now,
The dark side really does have better cookies.

Here's truth...
A villian is just a hero of the other side
There are no good guys. There are no bad guys. We all have our motives for what we do here or we wouldn't be here.

A change you could perform to fix this right now with 5 lines of code that wouldn't hurt anyone and would immediately restore balance to the ruleset is to eliminate the amount of money a single posting has made from being visible on the website at all. If they want to look it up, make them look it up on the blockchain. It's not hard and I'm sure there are plenty of folks willing to build a historical "steem winners board" for you after the payout is complete.

Do this, then change the trending algorithm to reflect the number of upvotes in the last 24hrs rather than the amount of cash earned. Otherwise this place looks like a pinata to the outside world.

"Omg! Phat Lewtz! -- Leeroy Jenkins"

Many people are saying that "The money I earn is my business. I just want to see my name up there in lights on the front page once in awhile. I've got twice as many people voting me up as the guy/gal with $1,000 but I can't even stay in "active". They can also look around them and see that many others feel the same way." It builds resentment and that's not something you want in a social networking community. We are all socially connected and hard feeling and contempt spread like disease or wildfire.

In truth, no other site features a posting based on "ad revenue generated", so why are we featuring posts based on ad revenue spent? Doesn't that seem a bit backwards?

If people make $10k there is no reason they can't make a "Woohoo! I made bank!" posting and if the actual community values that sort of thing (which we do sometimes) then give them the chance to say so and let them feel like it actually matters.

You just made the code to steemit opensource, thank you for that. I'm perfectly willing to step up to the plate to personally make the changes and submit a PR, or stand up a demo site somewhere so you can see how this place looks under that rule set if you prefer. But either way, this alone will placate the vast majority and cause a substantial number of bot controlled accounts to use their accounts personally instead of relying on a bot for personal satisfaction.

That alone takes care of your larpers. They just want a chance to hit the front page without having to force a non-existent social connection by trying to attract a whale. It would also take care of the content which is beginning to swing towards "how to attract a whale, or why the whales don't care about us, or why this platform will fail, hint it's the whales".

As the ratio of minnows to whales increases, this kind of content will only become more prevalent and even the whales are complaining that there is way too much content for us to curate properly, we only get so many votes per day and there are only a handful of us
To outsiders (even many insiders), this looks like power consolidation in the upper echelons. But in truth the problem is you don't have enough mods to run your dungeons.
That's all a whale actually is, a mod.

Everyone reading this! It's not the whales ignoring you, it's the trending algorithm ignoring you because a whale hasn't noticed you and bothered to toss an upvote your way. You feel locked in a dungeon because you need a mod to come unlock you so you can level up and keep playing. But there are way too many of us and not anywhere near enough mods. No one is commenting about your insightfulness because no one is seeing you. This is literally a couple lines of code to fix.

So drop some celldoor keys please and let the players have their fun.

Unfortunately your problem is more than just the larpers.

You have a swarm problem. These upvote/downvote swarms and oneliner chatter bots you're trying to swat away?

This is a what an attack on a subjective proof of work system looks like and you need to ask yourself why you are fueling an arms race, when history has shown time and again that arms races never end well for either side. Disarmament and peace, despite what you may think of your adversaries, is the only viable longterm option.

Why?
Consider what @dana-edwards has been saying literally this whole time in every single blog post she's made. You've been reading and upvoting her stuff, so I know you get this, but you seem to be viewing it purely academically and missing the applicability to steemit.

You know what Stigmergy is. But for those who don't, it's a high energy task that then makes it easier for other independent agents to convert to a following state because it leaves a trace in it's environment. This produces an emergent swarm or hive like behavior.

This happens with hornet attacks, and it's also the cause of bank runs and panic sells.

Stigmergy is the actual problem here and this is what @dana-edwards and myself have been talking about for weeks now. Including that day when the topic was trending and made $10k.

Stigmergic effects are what I'm doing when I post this. It's a huge amount of energy, I'm expending to leave a trace that others can follow more easily.

Your problem is not the spam bots. They are merely a symptom of stigmeric artifacts within the steemit environment.

There are tutorials on this site that show you exactly how to make a one liner chat bot and an upvote bot. That was the high energy task, that triggered the cascade you see before you.

Don't you find it curious that you have 3 kinds of bots actually causing all the ruckus? Really there are only two kinds of bots people are complaining about because they are the most visible. The downvote swarm is just the upvote bot running in reverse. The other kind is the inane one hit wonder bot.

It's all because of a couple of quicky tutorials someone posted here a couple months ago trying to encourage people to try programming bots for this platform that's all!

Those postings combined with the effects of seeing tons of low quality bots on here are also the environmental trace. It's causing people to say Gee if he can do it so can I!.

That's Stigmergy people! You're acting like a hive mind when you do that.
Build bots if you want to learn about them, but don't be one yourself!

The only viable long term solution is to get these guys while they're young and new then teach them to build something more useful with that enthusiasm.

Once they get good at this bot stuff, maybe they could take those same skills and help by contributing to software development tasks as well.

Either way, the bot problem in general has nothing to do with the incentives. It has to do with an extremely low barrier to entry, an innate curiosity about programming and a lack of available knowledge about how to build a decent bot that doesn't harass and annoy.

But we can incentivize good bots, just look at @cheetah & @jeeves and to a lesser extent @wang

Knowledge actually fixes this problem.

Next time you want to look at any sort of bot problem. Keep in mind that bots are entirely owned by people. People that want to learn to program. Building a social robot is a dream come true for many people. Good useful bots that do important tasks. However they don't yet have the know how in order to do it correctly and the incentives aren't all that clear unless you're really looking at this as someone who builds AI for a living.

Most of us, just want to help by making useful tools.

This concept of acceptance and a firm guiding hand does work

@cheetah has most people treating him, literally like the community pet.
It is possible, you just can't have a me too bot.

And if you look at the STEEMBOTS posting I've linked, you'll see that I have managed to reach out to at least some of the bot owners and offer them solutions along with tools to make their bots better, more useful, less annoying etc. In exchange they are implementing leash codes #STEEMBOTSTAY or #STEEMBOTCOME in order to keep their pets from humping your leg every time you come to the door.

Because that's all a bot really is. Replace bot with pet when you're talking about this topic and your reference frame immediately shifts to the correct mindset. This also means if you kick someone's dog, the owner will get upset (github issue 221).

Unfortunately the "flag is downvote" crowd has caused a lot of strays to come into being as their owners follow that tutorial and then end up leaving their pet alone in the wild, as they see their first tentative creations outright rejected, never coming back to check on it.

So my advice...
If you want to stop 90% of your botspammers today instead of next week, examine the headers and logs closely on your websocket connection (refusing to allow the connection unless they are originating directly from the site) and 90% of bots are going to shut down immediately. This is effectively euthanizing the strays.

That's a bandaid solution, but it works right now until we can get the attention of their owners.

It won't get them all, but it will get the ones using that tutorial since that is the tutorial bot's achilles heel. Anyone who has upgraded their skills and moved onto other methods already, probably won't notice. But those ones aren't strays. They have a home and someone taking care of them. We just need to get them collared, tagged and vaccinated against rabbies, before it spreads further.

In the meantime, this is free aspiring programming talent and free computing resources being thrown in your lap in order to make this place better (better being a highly subjective term here).

You would do well to understand their motives, lay some ground rules and then leverage it to maximum effect. This is an exciting time in the world AI and @dantheman you have built the perfect platform for a host of different AI theories to be proven and tested.

Most of your botbuilders are researchers, educators, and enthusiasts. You could end up with the first social media network where human and AI work together to police content, determine mood, uncover criminal intent (see my post on mediashare), incentivize quality content production etc, all while doing things people are just doing naturally. These aren't all chatterbots you're dealing with.

That's it for now and thanks for reading this.