My thoughts on the controversy over upvote bots
I spent a few minutes today starting to learn how to code a curation bot. I started from this helpful post by @xeroc. My general plan is this:
- Learn how to do it.
- Use the bot to generate a stream of articles which I can manually upvote (I'm not a big fan of downvoting.)
- Continuously tune the filtering to suit my preferences.
- As I come to trust the bot, begin letting it make some decisions without my help.
- Continue to improve the bot according to the following goals:
- Only upvote posts that I would have upvoted manually (i.e. automatically curate the site according to my own tastes).
- Raise revenue through curation.
- Increase its autonomy.
Basically, I want to automate the same things I'd be doing manually. I want good voting decisions in order to help raise the value of my long-term position in steem power, and I want short and long term revenue. I assume most bot authors are pursuing similar goals.
However, the comments in @xeroc's post caught my attention. Apparently, the idea of creating upvote bots is somewhat controversial. For example,
Wanna to vote against the voting bots. Sorry.
and
This is not good for the system really. To be clear I'm not "blaming" you - people will do what they have to do given a certain rule set. It's just that the system needs to tweak the incentives so that scripted participation, instead of human judgement in terms of quality, is not rewarded. Otherwise what's the point?
and
Why make it easier for people to bring vote quality down? If someone else wants to write their own anti-social bot, they can do it themselves.
Needless to say, the fact that I started this project implies that I disagree with those commenters, but I'll try to be open to persuasion. At heart, isn't Google's PageRank just a massive curation engine? Couldn't some well-tuned algorithms help to improve the feed quality on steemit? To me, curation seems like a perfect job for an algorithm (specifically, an evolutionary algorithm).
Yes, early generation algorithms will have problems, but over time they will improve. In the long run I think that - as with Google's search rankings - a hybrid of human and machine curation will produce the best results. What do you think?
I think we are on groundbreaking turf here. We have gone where nobody has gone before. In the begging, there were assumptions, thoughts, and ideas, as these pan out. We need to test, we need different people with different goals, doing different things. Especially when they are willing to share their experience. Bot on my friend.
I'm against unsupervised voting bots and using voting bots to maximize curation rewards when the human that owns the bots never bothers to read the posts.
Like you, I want to know how to create and code one. Not because I think they're good or bad, for me or for the platform, but because I think I need to fully understand them and how they work before I can figure out my opinion about them. Like @whatsup said, this is groundbreaking stuff.
Last night I got to the point where I am able to find a post, apply some filtering, and perform an upvote. In all it took me about 4-6 hours to go from zero to having a python environment and being able to upvote (Windows 10). Now it's a matter of tuning (or... eventually... training). @xeroc did leave a few details out, but if you want to learn, the @xeroc link in my top post is a really good start.
Thank you for that. I'm gonna have to have my 13 yo son help with this, I think. :)
One thing is for sure, it is a good learning experience trying to write a bot, it also gives you a deeper understanding on how things work around here. I've been working on a curation bot for some time now, a bot that tries to find good posts by new and unestablished yet authors on Steemit and support them. It is already doing pretty well, though I'm doing changes and improvements all the time and I do check all of the voted posts manually do be able to further tweak things... guess how I found your post and which of the voters is the bot.
So by all means do try to write your own curation bot if you have some good ideas, people generally have negative impressions of bots, but they can also be used to help...
Yeah, just dont say it's a bot, and those "bot-haters" cannot tell the difference from a "reader" that does not speak English and never comment at a single post.
There is probably some merit to an argument that bot voting will allow the overall voting mechanism to degrade to some degree immediately. Indeed, there is probably merit to an argument that there may be some inherent degradation even some time after an initial recovery (as anticipated after a seemingly endless experience of app "improvements" that leave me feeling nostalgic—and in fact, in many cases causing me to install legacy versions or alternate apps in favor of manual, yet more effective feature sets) . Certainly, some voting bots will end up voting very poorly (like mostly curating cat videos even though their creator wouldn't). However, I don't immediately see how one could evaluate those bot votes as inferior to manual human votes. In other words, there is probably some merit to an argument that voting (in any and all forms) will allow the overall mechanism to degrade from time to time. So, maybe the presupposition that a bot vote is necessarily degrading while a human vote is necessarily maintaining integrity and high quality may be flawed to begin with?
As far as supervision, and the idea that bot votes without a human confirming votes (let alone reviewing a queue and manually voting) or without a human even consuming the media after a bot vote:
I don't see an inherent issue. Suppose I like any and all posts about buttered toast. I like pictures of it, songs about it, descriptions of what it tastes like, and scientific analysis of it. I like to upvote buttered toast deniers as well as the buttered toast promoted material, 'cause I'm just that into buttered toast and I really want other people to know about it. If left to my own devices, I'll miss most of what's out there about buttered toast, but if I create a bot to curate a buttery, toasty world of consumable media, buttered toast fans everywhere will benefit from my effort to build the butter-loving beast.
All that is to say, in summary, that perhaps many objections to this kind of evolution of platform interaction are purely knee-jerk reactions (and should be ignored purposefully for the lack of foundation they represent). Perhaps.
Of course, this is all anecdotal and speculative, but maybe it adds something of note to the conversation anyway.
Have fun. It'll be interesting to see how this goes for you.
[√] I am not a robot (I think).
That's an interesting point that I hadn't considered. A bot could easily do a daily post with its list of upvoted titles, authors, and links, then people with similar tastes could follow the bot. That's something that would be tedious for a human curator.