RE: An idea for a bot to help combat the comment spam
Something to think about:
Some time ago I had a fairly long chit chat back and forth about one of the posts I made. There were many short sentences added to the replies. None were upvoted. The content of that conversation helped a fellow steemian to understand something. If you had you bot running, I suppose our (or my) reputation would have been below zero. Why should helping someone result in my being downvoted? People SHOULD be able to have a conversation (this is supposed to be a community where we build friendships) without worrying about voting for ever post made. Same goes for following: I may have something to say about a post that adds insight (as I hope I'm doing now) without feeling pressured to follow the person.
Honestly, I just don't see the value in your project and it could do more harm than good. Perhaps I misunderstood what the bot will be doing and in that case I apologize.
I'm not fond of the obvious cut-and-paste "love your post. Upvoted and followed. Please follow me too" type of comments either. I've actually investigated a couple and was tempted to throw a flag at them and then decided against it. My choice was simply to ignore it. If everyone did the same then there would be no benefit for the culprit to continue doing so and they would stop.
A conversation would only be penalized once and then only if the main post was not upvote or the post's aurtor was not followed. Even then the x:1 ratio I suggest would mean if you would only get on the blacklist if you were commenting on more than x times more post than you vote on. As you are likely following some of the authors that inspired you to comment, the fact that you only have 10 votes should get you or the bot's blacklist. And if I see an honest author on the blacklist I will adjust x so as there are off it. The bot will not be released until I am sue not innocents are getting on the blacklist
I don't understand what is wrong with building community by chatting without voting. We vote when we wish to reward an author. We chat when we wish to communicate something. The 2 are not related.