What kind of problems do you think bots pose to social media blockchains? What kind of benefits do you believe they bring?
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Instead of commenting my thoughts. I will leave mine below.
I think a big danger is reciprocal vote automation. A person can create multiple accounts, put money into each and then have them all upvote each other. As for benefits, bots can also be used responsibly for things such as data analysis or batch operations in rewards distribution for example.
Helpful comments will be upvoted. Number of upvotes equals your share in the post rewards! Bring your best comment! Don't forget to upvote the post to increase the pool. No self voted comments. Good luck!
I agree with your statement that broadly speaking, when it comes to votes and rewards, this is the danger zone. Correct me if I am misinformed, but such a scheme of cooperation to dole out votes, doesn't require bots at all - the bots simply make the abuse more 'efficient'.
wrt good vs bad BOTS and my own use of BOTS, I have pinned it down in my limited understanding, to an assessment of the degree of human intervention - is there a human being actually reading the content before the upvote is 'transacted'. If that human element is removed, I believe it degrades the site and overall user experience. I also have no need for such an upvote bot.
I know this whole discussion can't easily be divorced from the concerns of those with myopic VE$T'd interest. Perhaps we are living through a panic sell and we don't see the forest for the trees, but to my mind, holding onto one's power instead of selling it to bidders seems more intelligent in the long term. Aren't the principles of the blockchain about enabling merit or user desire to overide more disproportionate forces. Perhaps this crisis reveals more about ousrelves and our current development than we are willing to acknowledge.
But there is hope, I believe. It isn't the BOTS that threaten the blockchain. It is the humans willing to use tools that degrade the utility of the blockchain and those who are willing to remain on the sidelines while it happens, that threaten it.
still trying to figure out how i feel about bots. I find many posts of mine will get an up vote form someone that is then followed by 10-100 more. Yet the post only has like 15 views.
Trying to learn more about how I think that impacts the culture of the platform...I think if it loses its personal interactions as a norm the platform will eventually get replaced...however I do not think its there or even close to there yet
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
Yes, I've received a few of those in my time here. When I used to use bid bots, I remember there was one called ninjawhale. The thing about that one is it wouldn't just lay 1 upvote on your account but many.
I think the average Joe would be none the wiser and just might add their own based on the perception of popularity. That's another issue but the lack of personal interaction is a huge one!
yea its hard to say how many people actually value anything i write - and if they choose to come back to my content or maybe just see it scrolling through their feed
For now I like the bots (er... some of their types) I think they can be helpful... Someone who doesn't have friends can use their power to earn some views and those friends.
But at the same time I see the risk they do for the community. The same person above can get drunk on their power and use them when they don't need them... I try to use them fairly but still...
Exactly. It's all fun and games until a powerthirsty bot owner tries to create a self serving reward machine as I described. I mean they would certainly have the SP to get it going.
I don't like using bots but have in the past the way it was explained to me. I can't say whether or not it really got me over the new user hump. I think one thing that helps is being part of a smaller community for getting votes.
Hello. You writing is a good invitation at the right time for me because I found this service called @shadowbot - you have more experiencve so if you heard about that, what do you think about that one? There are good bots and bad for sure.
I can't really make a determination unless I become more informed with @shadowbots curation patterns. I think the general idea is for people who would like to automate some of their voting power. I guess that's fine as long as it isn't voting on trash. I think any automated curation process should be subject to some degree of manual validation.
I share that opiniuon entirely. From my examination of the shadowbot, they aim to spread small votes across the pool based on some algorithm that searches out the quality of posts as well. I am not sure and I hope to find out how this happens. There are extreme limits on voting frequency. There was an auto-resteem feature which was disabled when it caused big problems - so the managers have decided to re-work the concecpt and allow for more granular control by the user about that. There is also an auto-follow-back feaure - both these are something the user can disable by choice too. They invoke some filters using cheetah and some anti-plagiarism checks too.
I signed up, and I want to see if it is something I myself can defend with conscience, hence your repsonse is so valuable to me. Thank you. The one good thing about it is there is no money for votes scheme going on and there may be some features which allow for manual (human) intervention in the process of follow and re-steem.
Great insightful post!
Thanks a lot for great discussion ....
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