Botland
Bots are prevalent in all social media platforms and serve to automate and speed up different tasks for the people that run them. Some bots are designed with good intentions while others are designed to spread misinformation or to steal information from naïve people.
With the creation of Steem, we now have a social media platform that takes social media and combines it with cryptocurrency. But now, 2 years after the creation of Steem, we are seeing the creation of a new type of media. A platform that combines elements of Bitcoin and social media and creates a twisted child vastly different than its creators ever intended.
![computer-1873831_640.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmVrrVvaYVQn6s2kcj4RbNzmKbNp7FUGuXGy5jsQzWkQgY/computer-1873831_640.png)
Invasive Species
Bots are limited in scope and power with traditional social media platforms due to the platform having a central authority. If the bot or bots pose a threat to the control of their platform, this central authority can simply shut them down and remove them from the social network. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter come with the threat of censorship when the authorities of such networks deem it necessary.
But Steem, like Bitcoin is on a network that is preserved on hundreds of nodes and validated through a robust blockchain. Censorship of the blockchain is basically impossible. You simply have too many copies of the database to erase and you need significant amounts of stake (and thus money) to even control transactions on the network. With no central control, bad actors are much harder to contain.
Bots that become problems are no longer easy to deal with by applying a few changes to some algorithms and a couple of alterations to a central database. You simply can't erase bots from the network build on top of a blockchain. These bots are now free to exploit other users and mechanisms as they please and are only limited by the level of governance provided by the blockchain in question.
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, everyone runs a bot. It's call a miner. In Proof-of-Stake blockchains, most people with large holdings of a token run a bot. This allows them to stake their coin and earn something back in return depending on what actions they take. Witnesses on the Steem blockchain run specialized software to verify blocks. We could consider these programs as bots. But Steem attempts to do something different with part of the rewards. Reward content creators and curators with a slice of the pie.
A portion of Steem tokens are set aside in a rewards pool and are allocated through the Proof-of-Brain mechanism which allows accounts to allocate rewards to posts that are deemed worthy by those accounts. At initial glance, such an action would run contra to other blockchains. A system where the intent is to distribute the rewards based on human subjectivity and social consensus rather than mathematical rigidity and cold algorithms.
But like an invasive species, bots naturally would find their way into such an ecosystem that was designed to work without needing them. Rather than bots being the requirement, bots were now competitors to human beings. This is how all social networks work and why bots are so hated on other platforms. Bots create artificial noise that prevent people from easily communicating and propagating their ideas to as many people as possible.
And with our new ecosystem build on top of the Steem blockchain and rewards available such competition is pushed into the spotlight instead of the background. Bots provide efficiency while lacking authentic emotion while humans provide creativity but in broken separated intervals. Given the intent of the system, authentic connection and communication should be the goal, but the allure of money-hungry miners have brought bots from blockchains where they were welcome onto one where they compete for the resources with ordinary users.
And what have been the results of two years of experimentation? Initially creators and curators were given the opportunity to thrive and their populations were able to grow. But now more than ever, it seems like the bots are more integral to daily activity on the platform and authentic interaction is becoming endangered.
The Birth of Anti-Social Media
All bots are not created equally. Depending on the intent of the designer and the implementation of the idea, bots can perform all sorts of tasks ranging from helpful to detrimental. But we need to remember the parents of Steem. Cryptocurrency and Social Media. Helpful bots should help users both engage in meaningful experiences and provide that user a means of deriving value in a secure network. Harmful bots do the opposite. Unfortunately given the current slant towards speculation in the space, the second parent (social media) is often completely forgotten by human users and bots alike.
Given the current speculative wave, a large majority of investors in the space are out to make money for themselves. They could care less about the potential of the technology to solve real-world problems and give meaning to people's lives. They care more about the bottom line and profitability. And naturally efficiency would be a target of such investors.
So we have our Steemit ecosystem and we have the initial group of users. But where's is the bias of these users? They are hungry for money rather than social interaction. To many users on the Steem blockchain, social media is a vehicle to earning money. Thus, their focus is not creativity, but efficiency and building a profitable engine that generates a nice income. The mindsight here is unhealthy and this ultimately gives the bots an advantage.
For bots thrive on automation and efficiency, but lack creativity. But if a majority of the userbase and accounts could care less, then the environment is ripe for their propagation among users within the community. So, we now have the ingredients for the creation of a new type of media. Something worse than spam, advertisement, and stupid cat videos. We have media created specifically used to achieve a selfish means of the author. Anti-social media.
You see spam, advertisements, and stupid cat videos are designed to invoke some response with some audience. And some degree of creativity and cleverness is involved to create such content (although it is admittedly a very low degree). With anti-social media, the content solely serves as a means to an end. A piece of content not to be observed, but to serve as a vehicle to connect an individual to some rewards. And given that the majority of users agree with such practice, you aren't going to get a lot of push back against those sorts of practices.
But you don't need bots to create anti-social media feeds. There are quite a few individuals that plagiarize content in order to upvote themselves and hope to steal a few votes from people that aren't paying attention. And given the environment, such action is profitable because most people could care less about anti-social media and are more focus on milking the system themselves. But bots can take advantage of this greed.
Botland
A large majority of Steem-based social platforms utilize a similar codebase (condenser) and thus utilize the same built-in feeds that Steemit has. Trending. Hot. Active. New. These groups can be further filtered by certain tags, but such filtering is rather limited due to users being able to use multiple tags. Since New serves as a firehose and Active isn't really that useful and not used by Steemit anymore, we are left with the Hot and Trending tags. Both tags are heavily reliant on getting lots of stake-weighted support.
Because of the clunky user experience, time on the trending and hot tags is valuable. And given that the stay on the hot tag is very brief, the trending section is the only place where users can regularly have their content connect with new and fresh audiences who are just discovering the platform. Thus, it is very desirable to put content there in order to grow an account and to achieve the goal of making lots of money.
Trending at first was simply a place where whales simply picked content that suited their tastes or content that belonged to friends of theirs. Although flawed, this content had some social components to it and were written to be read by an audience. But now that's not necessarily the case.
Today trending is Botland. Look at the top voters on these posts. All bid-bots. What are bid-bots? The natural evolution of greedy investors, ruthless efficiency, and adopting mining techniques from other blockchains. Essentially what has been created are ruthless monsters that take the money of profit minded individuals and only vote for their content.
Rather than vote for content that is the most sincere, the most authentic, and the best quality; votes are given to individuals with the greatest desire for attention and profit. Botland is a shining city of the rich and the rest of the population is left with the scraps in underground ghettos that are hard to find and hard to filter the gems from the trash.
What is left is a mechanism to elevate content regardless of the content itself. Anti-social media now has a way to rise to the top and the social part of the platform is choked off and starved and growth of the platform stagnates. In Botland, bots serve as central authorities of content and must be bribed in order to be granted access to the gated utopia.
In Botland, the investors and the owners of the bots get rich as they have essentially built efficient mining pools that outcompete regular users when left to allocate rewards to different users. In Botland, owners regularly spread propaganda about how great their machines are and talk about how many people they help. In Botland, they take credit for contributing to quality content and helping grow the blockchain when they are choking out honest opinion and thoughtful artists who simply want a platform that allows them to express their advice without dealing with central authorities.
But in Botland, the central authorities are no longer CEOs concerned about the appearance of a platform. The central authority is a bot that doesn't care about you. They simply grant access to the people willing to pay the most. Social media doesn't matter anymore, running a bidbot operation is simply a better social mining algorithm than treating the platform as a social media platform. Steem is an anti-social media blockchain where some individuals still care enough to produce good stuff, but such people are an endangered species where extinction isn't completely out of the question.
Requiem For A Vision
Recently, Steemit co-founder Dan Larimer wrote a piece describing the limits of governance in the crypto-space. But more importantly, he lays out three premises for which he bases his work on. The latter two are solid arguments, but his first point has the aura of someone naively optimistic towards the people around him.
The vast majority of people have good intentions
If this was the case, Botland would be a theoretical state that simply wouldn't occur because the good people of Steemit would see how such structures are harmful to meaningful social interaction and effective cryptocurrency security practices (keeping stake and power decentralized). But Botland seems like an inevitability and a dystopic state where people's voices no longer matter, their wallets do.
People aren't fundamentally good. People aren't fundamentally bad. People are animals and want to survive so they can propagate the species. Because of this, people are inherently selfish and greedy.
Perhaps the potential collapse of Steem and the growing corruption of the vision of the platform helped Dan to leave Steem. Dan seems like an optimistic person and one who is set on achieving his vision. He knows what happens when such platforms go rotten and greed overtakes the system.
The more corrupt a group is the faster it will die.
If there is any good left on the Steemit blockchain, they should care about the well-being of the platform and will try to avoid such a collapse from happening. But with the rampant greed in the cryptocurrency space, death seems like a pretty plausible option. Not to say that such a platform will not be revived, but even then it will have lost to bigger and better organized projects.
But the vision of combining social media and blockchain technology is dying. May we take the moment to acknowledge the potential and may we now recognize that such a vision was simply an obtainable utopia as those with power are always corrupted and turn into the monsters they swear they would never become.
I'll be here in the underground if anybody needs me. You might not find me buried in the waves of anti-social media and automated responses, but one day, maybe we can leave Botland for something better.
And what is worst, most of the people that have the power to act (witness and whales) are too short sighted to care.
There is some whales that care, but most of them are too busy looking for ways to increase ther stack and get more and more.
One constant motto here is that "it's his stack, he can do whatever he wants", wich is true, but the problem is that these big players actions afect the community as a whole (and its future).
So it does matter what they do with their stack. If they don't use it properly, Steem will be doomed.
Honestly, i like the idea of Steemit as a whole, but humans are too flawed and naturally greedy to make things works without any kind of control.
If the whales don't start taking effective actions to change things (like giving some flags), as soon as a good competitor appears, Steemit will have only bots and whale dick suckers begging for votes.
Code is absolute control. The present code absolutely creates the rules that effect the current blockchain, and enable whales to generate ROI from their stakes. This is why it is the way it is, because the devs and witnesses that control the code are controlled by stake, through stake-weighted VP.
I believe this is the present plan. SMTs FTW!
Given the initial concentration of Steem by miners, what can Stinc do? Either they cater to the holders of that Steem, or the holders of that Steem move on to other investments. The holders of that Steem generate ROI from the extant rules. They don't want them changed. The things you might want to see flagged are how they generate that ROI.
I definetly want a steemit competition as soon as possible.
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Such a good post. Resteemed and full upvote ;)
I picked some poignant parts to highlight among it all, that sums up the situation quite well:
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I have long been a proponent of having human consciousness evaluate actual content, not automated upvotes or buying blind upvotes... I saw it as a flaw in the behavior of the community, a flaw in the goal to create success for Steem. Concentration of power and money ruling the platform is something I have addressed in the past as well.
The death-spiral seems to be growing. Infatuation on false perceptions has fizzled and the reality is laid bare for many to see.
The sad thing about it all is that the devs seem to be ok with current situation. Steemit just highly rewards bid bots and low quality - high quantity content right now. I just wrote about how the social aspect it totally going away and how real upvotes become harder to get because the system rewards extremely selfish behavior including some solutions. [Link]. I'm affraid steemit needs to be near death before something fundamentally changes, my hopes are more on @dan with the steemit competitor he's planning to make.
An essential misunderstanding that has contributed to the present problem is that quality of content is presumed to be the driver of a quality social media platform, when it is actually the quality of social relations that is the determinant factor. Monetary rewards has proved enormously beneficial to social relation quality, and has produced a platform with suprisingly few trolls and superb engagement by tapping into the power of a gift economy and creating a means of gifting without decreasing the holdings of the giver.
However, the ROI of stakeholders is the actual metric that rules Steemit, and Steem, presently. The social media aspect of the platform is merely justification and cover for the Steem mining function that keeps the whales feeding Stinc and the top witnesses. Stake-weighting is the essential mechanism that ensures this.
Were the social media to be the focus of the platform, investors (as whales prefer to be called, obfuscating the ninjamine that generated most of their stakes) would be dependent on capital gains for their rewards. Since but few of them have any experience actually investing, this is a scary thought.
@dan may have learned from Steemit how to avoid this problem. If Stake is allowed to weight VP on his new creation, he will but create another cryptomining application, rather than a social media platform. I'm not overly confident a social media platform is his actual purpose.
Like everyone else, he is responsible for his personal situation in life, and I expect to see that reflected in his work. I would love to be pleasantly surprised. I'm not going to bother to invest my emotional well being in hope things will be otherwise though.
Thanks for the long reply valued-customer !
You actually make a very valid point and it made me change my mind on how I see things. Steemit indeed succeeds in creating a social platform without all the negativity that often comes with the other social media platforms. It's really hard to get a good grip on how to properly see things on this new kind of platform, but something I really enjoy thinking about.
But at the same time, the death spiral can act as a cleansing of the greed off the platform. For smaller users, everything would be just fine. For investors, they are the ones at the most of actually losing something. Assuming that people still want to the use the blockchain when the price is only a few cents, the community should survive. But the first mover advantage of the network will all but disappear.
The whole crypto space has been ruined by greedy assholes.
It was meant as a system for peer to peer transactions without the interference of government or big business. Now crypto is unusuable as currency due to the wild speculator spikes, by greedy assholes trying to get rich quick off it.
Same thing seems to have happened here. Give people something nice that would benefit the common good and always some idiots come along and ruin the system for their own personal gain.
I'm just surprised the devs didn't see this coming, it's human nature and was bound to happen.
I must note that devs are human too, and do work for their personal gain. Why would you suspect this situation wasn't their actual intention? Cui bono?
good point ! I'm obviously fairly new to the site but I've seen a lot of people unhappy that the whales are all circlejerking each other for profit. I wondered why the devs haven't stepped in and did something about it, unless they're profiting from it also ?
I know it's just assholes abusing the system, but if the system is designed such that more power means more money means more power means... then it's just an exponential increase until the system implodes.
You have understood capitalism.
=D
lol, I did think that :-)
The greedy assholes are a virus. The virus will either kill or be killed. If you kill the virus you emerge stronger than before. The virus is a necessary evil. It is vital for evolution.
This is a great piece, and deserves far more attention than it's likely to get. (It's also beautifully written).
This. Right here, for me, is the core of it all, the something rotten in the state of Denmark that has bothered me almost from the start of my time here. I don't know if this applies to the average person, but that is what the average writer was hoping to escape when they came here. Most of us already live lives dominated by the super-rich (whether we admit it to ourselves or not). Replicating this servitude, and somehow making it worse - this is not what most people had in mind when they joined.
And that is not to say that those with more Steem power don't deserve to have more influence. But simply that those with lots of power don't leverage the platform against itself and force smaller users to give up money in order to be properly heard.
Everyone should have an opportunity to be heard but not necessary have a right to be heard. Money can be an factor that impacts one's success, but it can't be the only factor.
Great job putting this together. It's been sad to see the platform change so much since I joined & I'll admit that I used to used pay for upvotes up until a few months ago when I started to see the things you point out in this post.
I've always known that this platform is like the real world and that the majority of power (SP) is held by a tiny minority of accounts who receive most of the rewards but there did seem to be a few whales who wanted to make things better but now it seems like things have gone too far to be fixed if it is even possible to fix them at all.
I'm powering down for this reason as I don't have the faith in the platform that I once did & I don't want to holding 1000+ worthless Steem Power in 6 months to a year thanks to greedy whales & thier Bidbots.
It is really weird that @ned and friends are letting all this go down. Do they really not care? Are they too busy? Are they continually catering to investors? Do they not know the answer? Maybe all four.
The core developers are busy fixing problems with the Steem implementation and are experiencing problems (or at least that is the impression I get from the GitHub). It appears that Ned and Co. are too ambitious and are trying to do too much at one time. As a result, not a lot has been accomplished and everything is behind schedule. They should probably delay SMTs and focus on Appbase, Hivemind, and Scalability, but they probably won't.
I think this is a spot on assessment. Developers are notoriously bad for biting off more than they can chew. And thus, Soon™ was born. There are always unforeseen problems.
You'd think they'd learn, but they never do. As a rule of thumb developers need to figure out how long something is going to take, and then double it.
I would not blame it all on the bots (well, as a developer I like the easy way how algorithms can interact with Steem), but rather on the economic model that facilitates the usage of bots, and bid bots in particular.
By the way, Steemit is not as decentralized as you think. There could be a very simple and straightforward change to Steemit that would take away a huge amount of power from bid bots: Simply exclude bot votes from the trending and hot sections. This is really not rocket science, I do it myself on a daily basis to filter bot promoted posts :-D.
Moreover, this could actually be done on the front-end side without the need of a hard fork. This decision can be made by the Steemit company without consensus because they run the Steemit front-end and the corresponding full node.
How do you filter out bot-promoted posts from your feed? I'd love to know.
Also, Stinc depends on the whales, and if they unilaterally cut the ROI of whales by axing bots, they will be looking for other work.
My bot @trufflepig does it by blacklisting all bid bots and vote selling services and monitoring all transactions to these services. Currently he publishes a top list of posts each day that were not promoted by bid bots. Maybe I'll turn him into a service that you can call him on demand for a top list for a tag of your choice.
I reckon that would be a popular service. Probably more effective at curtailing bidbots than any other device I can think of that is deployable presently.
Thanks!
Or we could develop better UI/UX implementations that focus on alternative metrics and have dedicated sub-communities to filter content among these groups. Sure, removing accounts using a blacklist can work, but if we subdivide the work load among smaller groups of people interested in similar things, active groups should thrive and inactive groups will simply fall apart. At the moment Steemit feels like a single giant mess with a lot of misclassified articles due to the ineffective tagging system.
Fortunately, @jga has started this journey already hosting a custom frontend on github:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@jga/introducing-custom-feed-filter-the-authors-and-posts-that-you-want-to-read
In this blockchain based platform there's only one way to improve things - users would need to want a change and act accordingly. There will always be bad characters, but the majority really pull the strings. If the community can work together (via smart witnesses) then all problems can be sorted. Otherwise, well....
Stake-weighted VP controls the platform, and 37 whales currently possess the vast majority of SP.
Because voting is weighted on stake, rather than 1 vote per account, the majority of Steem controls the platform, rather than the majority of users.
As you can see, the majority of Steem is held by 37 whales.
unfortunately this is just too true!
But I don't think bots are the problem here. The annoying and detrimental bots don't make it to much. The spam-machines and phishing propagation do get flagged pretty often.
The Vote-selling-bots imho are actually something that could help the platform spread out it's proof-of-brain-stake reasonably if the (human) operators had some sense of responsibility for the platform and did more to prevent rampant abuse and overuse...
The problem is really a human problem, and "bots" are just used to further those human intentions.
I still think the paradigm that has been set in an ecosystem where social-networking and blockchain-coinage meet holds huge promises.
But we do need a bit of a grassroots revolution and some whales to wake up if we want to prevent the demise you so reasonably expect.
The biggest issue with a grassroots revolution is how does one start it when the only ones who want change are all separated and hidden from each other? And they will only have enough power if they band together. Even then, we still might need whale help.
well... it's not like there are no whales that fight the good fight... albeit those are often using questionable method of their own...
I think it will forever be an evolving process that gets adjusted over and over... the platform has some leeway for the shifting collective conscience on the platform.
I am not sure if we are just having growth pains or if this thing is already mushrooming and about to tip over... but I do not think it's a lost cause yet!
hey... we just found each other... look at all these thoughtful comments on your post... you clearly struck a nerve here... we just need to keep building!
I think this is a good point, and not many people are realizing that we have already been changing the bot-shaped landscape. If you compare trending to what it was a couple months back you would certainly have seen a marked improvement because you have bot operators taking a stand and operating blacklists.
Also note that before bots, trending was just a whale circle jerk. Now it's more varied. But of course, there could be even more improvements...
exactly! I think voting bots do show a "constructive" force here, both in terms of discovery and in terms of reward distribution... albeit... a properly functioning "promoted" feature would still be much much better for the platform.
Or not? I mean there are some pretty obvious excessive vote-buyers who pretty much don't care for anything other than those paid votes and their returns...
But yes, that's exactly where the factor of responsibility come into play. I think questionable initiatives like the @grumpycat have been able to coerce some operators into improving their services to be more "healthy" for the platform.
I don't think it's a lost cause at all, but it will be critical to the further viability of the platform to further improve and iterate... there will probably never be the one set of rules to govern well for ever, so we'll just need to keep nagging and improving...
I was pointed here by a couple of helpful guys as I’m still learning about crypto. It was Steemit’s social media crossover that caught my interest originally. This was an informative article but it is a dismal outlook.
From my own limited experience, I can’t disagree about the sense of greed, or how difficult it feels to find and engage with genuine social interaction on this platform. Even I am feeling the pressure to use bots in some way, because it feels like a losing game to gain any traction otherwise. I’m still hopeful there’s a future for Steemit and that there will be ways to safeguard this platform. But maybe we’re all our own enemies. We complain about how Steemit is being ruined by quickly made, low quality content, but we’re all too busy being upset we’re not noticed enough that we don’t do our bit in showing interest in others. So it’s not just the bots. The platform creates anti-social behaviour by its nature, because looking into people’s wallet is anti-social.