The Bot Problem
The good, the bad, and the ugly
It's "not so good" It's not so good that there are users who own 20+ bot accounts
and that the platform enables good bots to each gain +20 reputation points in 3 days. Going from 25 to 45 takes away and thins out community.
I came here ten days ago and soon started exploring the blockchain and now run a blockchain info bot that you can query for any steemers reputation (down to the comma), what percentage of users have lower reputation than that steemers, which followers you share and so on. Being able to answer anyone on command, anywhere, means you want to stream all content that's been generated on the site.
On the very right, I check if the expression "I " is part of the text.
You take each post and analyze it for the content. In my case, when it's "@"
followed by a username, I give you info about that user. This is very specific.
What you could also do is scan if the post contains the word "bitcoin" or
"ethereum" or "litecoin", etc., and response with "X to the moon", where
you replace X with whatever is talked about. What you can also do is scan if the
comment contains the word "love" and as well as the word "cat", and reply with
"this cat is beautiful". Or do the same with something sports related.
You get the drill.
I don't wanna point fingers, and the, ethics of this aren't trivial, but consider this users who posts for 10 hours straight every day and seems to be very fond of coins and helicopters. What I find sad and a bit distressing is the hundreds of people who engage in conversations with the bot.
Now take my friend and tutor @lynor. He came here and made a quite elaborate and unseen first post on a usecase for the Raspberry Pi computer. I upvoted him, but that was about it. A week later, he got a random bot post and this post was in turn upvoted by 20 other bots. Nice money share...
What's your sentiment on the ethics of this situation?
Yours
@qed
Interesting. Upvoted and followed, would like to see more about this topic. Thanks for sharing!
Way to make my point, haha.
:) Still learning my way around.
Wow you can do that here? I think the bot are great tools if used properly. Unfortunately some people exploits this tools for their own gains. Nevertheless I think only a few people are knowledgeable enough how to use them and i am sure steemit administrator will come up with a solution if it becomes a big problem. great post you have earned a follower and an upvote.
Of course you can do it, you can do it everywhere. The question is how easy the system makes it and steemit makes it very easy. I'm not as optimistic as you, haha. I think steemit is largely an experiment and a prototype for other platforms we'll see in the future.
The bots definitely subtract value from the community. This is a very big problem for steemit and hopefully they are thinking of a plan to address it.
The owners will continue to run them as long as there is profit. Maybe there are ways to alter the system so it requires the user to solve a captcha to limit what bots can earn.
There is no way to control it. As soon as "someone" has the power to limit or remove money from accounts the whole house of cards falls as faith in the algorithms will be broken
Bots gonna bot. I don't think there's a way to crack down on stuff like this without drastically decreasing the user experience for everybody else.
On the bright side: Eventually, the people running them will spend their profits and they will end up somewhere else in the crypto economy. People can always downvote, too.
I think that argument goes by broken window fallacy.
Besides, I see that 5% resp. 8% of ALL steemit posts start with "Welcome" resp. "Thank". Just imagine the waste of energy :^P
4923 | Welcome to steemit, ... | istiaq69 |
4924 | Welcome to Steem @ja... | bottymcbotface |
4938 | Welcome to steemit. ... | mountrock |
4940 | Welcome to the steem... | selenanunu |
4964 | Welcome to steem @bl... | nickdavison |
4969 | Welcome dear friend ... | saqib |
4971 | Welcome @Jackrobins ... | mekong |
4978 | Welcome to steemit, ... | istiaq69 |
4979 | Welcome and Happy Bi... | mikej |
5019 | Welcome to steemit, ... | istiaq69 |
5032 | welcome diana ;)... | awpmaster |
5041 | Welcome @laidback.tr... | nickdavison |
Bonus info:
Your rep is 36.449052
:)
cpctony's password:
"ipvtfqbttpse"
OG
OG? What's that?
Original Gangster?
Hey, thanks for the tip.
At the moment there were also 3 request per day and that doesn't warrant me having my laptop at home of using up bandwidth. I'll bring him back once there's an actual audience and then I'll buy a small machine to run this kind of stuff on.
The code is simple, just steempy and there in the documentation they show you how to steam the comments and you must just react to that and assemble a message.
Nice post @qed.
Bots will be here and they will thrive. But the quality of this community still depends on real humans. For now, bots can automate voting, commenting, and other tasks allowed by the blockchain, but real people will deliver the quality content.
Of course, necessary improvements on the platform are always welcome.
When I signed up I had much higher hopes this would be more about a community of humans supporting each other, yet am learning it seems to be a lot more about being tech savvy & knowing how to take advantage of a financial system a'la the undying support of one's own Network (content doesn't even have to be good or original to be profitable so long as one's own Network is behind it with upvotes) & bots.*
*Insert /sadface/ here.
"the platform enables good bots to each gain +20 reputation points"
How can this be? What does the bot do to increase reputation at such a pace? Not the computing specifics, but what is the activity it does in Steemit. Posting? Commenting? Voting? This superfast rise in reputation: does it cost money to the bot owner?
Sorry for all these questions. I am quite curious about this. I am struggling to increase my reputation, just working as a simple human. The most valuable tool has been randowhale... Do these bots use services like randowhale?
Thank you very much for this info, and for any comment you might have
Just by mass interaction, posting "blog posts" where there's only a pic of a car or a flower and one line, or commenting "wow, amazing". If you post once every 3 minutes with positive stuff, sure people will follow and upvote when you post, even if the content is bland. I assume the owner transfers initial steem to the bot to give it a steempower headstart, which means more gain from upvotes and more bandwidth (otherwise you can't even post every other minute).
So it´s just quantity, and speed. I thing I get it. I actually see the type of activity you mention, as a matter of fact. Thank you for the insight.
Another remarkable aspect of your article is the self vote. Long, well written articles and stories with 0.05 rewards, and a picture of the grill prior to cooking the Sunday meal that gets hundreds. One the one hand, it´s just free market. On the other hand, it looks like a circular selfvoting thing, a ring, like you said.
Funny, my idea for the first Python application to build (I am starting to study Python in Codecademy) was a routine that allows to post at a specific time. Now I realize it maybe one of the main applications around.
Re: posting at a certain time. I'm sure others exist, but I came up with a quick solution too... I call my bot the boiler:
I´m using Streemian for this, now. I did not know it could schedule posts when I wrote this.
@sauravrungta
By just writing "@sauravrungta", you summoned the blockchain info bot:
99.974% of steemers have lower reputation than sauravrungta.
92.833% of steemers signed up later than sauravrungta (2016.07.14 at 08:20:03).
73.443 was the exact reputation of sauravrungta 4 days ago (update Fridays).
0 steemers are followed by both of you.
0 steemers are following both of you.
Hope that info helps, qed. You can ask @qed for more details. Take care!
so how do I do this exactly
There were only two people per day using the "service", so I dropped it. To run it, I must have the laptop streaming data 24/7.
But I can do it by hand.
You created your account on the 3rd of August at 02:07:06 and here are the people around you, reputation wise
@freiheit50: "99.578", "68.211"
@gotoperson: "99.577", "62.443"
@anarchyhasnogods: "99.576", "82.504"
@woman-onthe-wing: "99.575", "68.114"
@dresden: "99.573", "69.403"
@barrycooper: "99.572", "81.879"