Great idea.
Requiring a reply to vote would help solve this and encourage more discussion. Up or down, you gotta say something!
Then the bot makers would have to put effort into making relevant replies, or the account would be outed as a bot.
Great idea.
Requiring a reply to vote would help solve this and encourage more discussion. Up or down, you gotta say something!
Then the bot makers would have to put effort into making relevant replies, or the account would be outed as a bot.
As long as we don't know who operates the bot (or it's someone who doesn't care about his reputation), the operator can simply let the bot spam something. In the worst case it'd just add massive amounts of spam to the chain without changing anything in voting behavior :/
Yes, that is correct. But that is a completely different problem that hasn't even been discussed yet.
Step one to dealing with trolls and spammers (and bots) will be to identify them. Forcing them to speak to get curation rewards would help.
I know which bots have me in their list. But I also know most of their operators, so the issue I thought of may not be that big at all.
Still think it's risky to force posts, if it's abused new users will be seriously wondering why all posts have spam below them...at least the bots are quite right now.
Outing them is not the issue. The main problem with bots is their fast auto-voting to get an early position in the list of curators. We already know who that is, because they vote so fast that they're even quicker than the author in a lot of cases.
It sounds like you only have upvote bots. what if they were autodownvoting everything you posted? wouldn't you want it to comment so you could out it as a bot?
I did not suggest forcing anything, simply that if you want to vote and get rewards from it, it requires some conversation.
If its abused, then it becomes time to deal with the persistent troll\spam\bot account problem. (that is next in line anyway)