I'm a purist

I believe in doing things properly, the right way, the old fashioned way.

When I first joined Steem (almost two months ago), I flapped around like a fish out of water, not really aware of what was going on around me (in all honesty, I'm still flapping around a little). I could see how the system worked: you vote the good posts to reward them, you comment where you can add value and create a meaningful discussion, you resteem the posts worth sharing that may otherwise be missed, you follow like-minded people who you find interesting and you post good, solid content every day. And that is what I have been doing so far.

From https://pixabay.com/en/robot-artificial-intelligence-woman-507811/

WRONG!

How naive I was. Unfortunately it appears that Steem is more filled with abuse, greed and corruption than parliament or the global banking system! I had hoped that a crypto-based platform (seeing as crypto is all about fighting such abuses) would be free of such horrible things. Alas, this is not the case.

The Haejins and TheMarkyMarks (and many others) of this platform seem determined to show the middle finger to all the newcomers and those who would like the platform to operate properly. Steem is polluted with their spammed high-earning posts and their constant putting down of anything that challenges their biased views of what they want. It's very sad. Steem suffers for it. No newcomer would want to join if they knew the that are going on here.

And then you get the bots. Automated money machines for those too lazy to handle their own curation. "I'm staying well away from those!" I declared to myself, "That looks like cheating to me!"

The bots

For the most part, I was right. There are bots and scripts running 24/7 that are ruining Steem. For instance: I follow @revelationquotes and participate in the daily contests that he (possibly she?) posts. Every single post of his has this commented underneath

It's in your face and annoying. I've posted in reply to it but I just got ignored. I investigated further down that path only to reveal that the account in question blacklists those who don't agree with it and then constantly downvotes them. I have seen this with my own eyes. No fair! revelationquotes in no way deserves those comments, I have won a couple of his prediction competitions and the results speak for themselves:


I'm not seeing the scam...

People use scripts and bots to automate these downvote processes against those they don't agree with, and similarly they use them to upvote themselves and their cronies. So the majority of Steem rewards get circled among the few major Steem holders, and the new posters, the good posters, those who should be getting the incentives - they get marginalised and ignored. try to fight the system and make it what it should be and you actually end up downvoted.

What the hell Steem?

Realising this I put my mind towards a solution. I realised that for Steem to work how it should it would mean that:

• Bots would have to be banned - you do all your curation YOURSELF!
• No Resteeming. It creates a circle of brown-nosing. If you want to draw attention to a post then you should link to it from your own posts.
• The end of reputation scores. All Steeminians are created equal, but some Steemians are more equal than others. This system is being abused. With no bots around it would become unnecessary. You don't need reputation on Facebook do you?
• Anonymous voting. Same as the resteeming. If you don't know who voted for you, you won't try to vote for them as a reward (and get more of their votes in return). You'll vote only for good content that you enjoy! No more buddy-buddy systems!
• No more promoted posts - I hope that this much is obvious.
• No trending posts - same as the promoted posts. IF people see a good post, let them talk about it. I don't want someone else's idea of a good post shoved down my throat while it gathers a disproportionate share of rewards.

If all this is done then the cream will rise to the top and the abusers will disappear - their incentive to keep spamming and scamming the system having been removed.

But what's the chance of that happening? Probably 0% within the foreseeable future. Like most corrupt systems, those in power have the most say, and they will fight to stay in power!

So I've been looking at various bots and systems that I, as a new blogger wanting to get noticed, can use to spread the awareness of my posts and to gather quality readers who can benefit from reading my quality (I hope) content. But most bots look somewhere between vaguely corrupt and outright corrupt. I'm not interested in joining that.

Until yesterday. I was scrolling through the new posts doing some curation, when I saw a truly amazing post. It had over 2000 votes within an hour! It wasn't worth a massive amount of SBD like trending posts are, just 20 bucks or so. But the enormous amount of votes was more than I had ever seen before. So I dropped the author a comment, asking how he did it (not really expecting a reply). His answer was to join @shadowbot (https://shadowbot.us/shadowbot/login.php). I said I would check it out, which is what I spent my time doing last night (sleeping is so overrated!).

I really liked what I saw. It's not perfect, it's not the Utopian, uncorrupted Steem that I envisioned above, but I think it's a pretty good way to make use of a corrupted system. ShadowBot is basically a large Steem community that vote together on quality content. Essentially you let Shadow Bot control your upvoting for you (you can still upvote on your own, but the more you do that the less ShadowBot can vote for you because it needs to keep your voting power high). The system is designed to vote only for quality posts. Obviously it can be tricked somewhat, but it should still filter out a lot of rubbish. I also prevents spamming by only allowing each account to vote a maximum of one time every 24 hours for every other account. So I can't post 10 different posts every day, hoping to get a vote from the biggest whales in the group each time. ShadowBot will also regulate the voting power of big accounts, it won't vote at 100%, but rather it tailors the amount of vote to a score that each member of ShadowBot has. Your score grows by doing things conducive to the community, like maintaining high voting power, increasing your Steem power and authoring high quality posts.

I'm only just starting with ShadowBot now, so I can't yet write an objective assessment of how well it works and if it is as good as it says it is, but I'm cautiously optimistic and I hope that I've found something like the Steem platform that I was looking for - a fair one that looks at sharing and rewarding good content.

Note that I have nothing to gain by writing this post. I am in now way obliged to market ShadowBot and I don't get any extra reward for doing so. There are no referral links in this post. If you sign up by clicking a link in this post - I score absolutely nothing. But it does stand to reason that the bigger the community grows, the better it is for all, so I'm hoping to do my part by making you aware of it.

Give it a try, if it works for you: great; if it doesn't: leave. I'm going to test it out and perhaps I'll write about the results in a few weeks time. As with everything in crypto: DYOR. I did, and I'm happy to have found this particular bot.

Happy blogging all.

Yours in crypto,
Bit Brain

DISCLAIMER:
I am neither a financial advisor nor a professional trader/investor. This is not financial advice, investment advice or trading advice. Unless otherwise stated, all my posts are my opinion and nothing more. Crypto is highly volatile and you can easily lose everything in crypto. You invest at your own risk! Information I post may be erroneous or construed as being misleading. I will not be held responsible for anything which is incorrect, missing, out-of-date or fabricated. Any information you use is done so at your own risk. Always Do Your Own Research (DYOR) and realise that you and you alone are responsible for your crypto portfolio and whatever happens to it.