RE: A Question for Biologists
It's going to take me a long time to learn enough to get this done with everything else I've got going, but if someone doesn't beat me to it, I'd like to create a bot that's packaged and ready to download and run, where a user can simply fill out a form to describe their preferences for each different field of the article and press "go" to start curating. If someone else does it first, that would be good too.
I beat you to the punch on the idea a long time ago...
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@williambanks/announce-steembots-com-your-source-for-everything-bot-related-now-hiring
Then Xeroc beat me on releasing a viable product, so I just let that one slide.
Which reminds me, I need to place that website up for sale soon.
I definitely agree that it's all about the rewards, that's exactly where I'm wondering if evolutionary biology offers any insights.
Well yeah it does. Surviving generations learn to live on less, or more to places with easier food supply and less predation. They also develop defenses to stop predation.
Keep in mind, this isn't a system designed to emulate a true natural ecosystem.
In a natural ecosystem there is a fixed supply of energy in limited forms. The first order lifeforms, i.e. lichen, algae, bacteria etc exploit first order energy sources.
From there it's a predation cycle with bigger things eating smaller things. Each order of more advanced life using the next order lower down as a sort of battery, i.e. energy storage unit.
Here we have a fixed monetary supply which functions a little like money. But short of downvoting no one can really eat you by taking your money away. They can just make it harder for you to earn more.
I've got a basic upvote bot built using @xeroc's model, but it's got a long way to go to do the sort of things I'd like to do with it. I'm new to python and steemit, and I've never looked at the actual structure of any blockchain before, so it's slow going. That would be a hard row to hoe for people who have never written a line of code before.
I like your #STEEMBOTCOME hash-tag idea. Sort of like the robots.txt file. I think maybe you're on to something that line of thinking. Although at first blush, I have a hard time imagining why an author would tell the bots to stay away - unless it were tied to the reward system.
You and me both, but some people are just seriously phobic that they might catch cooties if they find out that they talked to a bot.
I've got bots on alts on here and frankly, I've personally had more flags than any of my bots. It's a matter of building your bot to be intelligent enough to play the game with people so they feel valued and not tricked. That means replies with more than repeating the same comment all over etc.
But as for curation, you're way better off doing some big data style analysis, finding who the top curator is and voting along with them. But then you're just creating a self fulfilling prophesy.