Voting Bots
Should we attempt to trap voting bots?
An Internet bot, also known as web robot, WWW robot or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human.
Given the exceptional speed with which bots can perform their relatively simple routines, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required. Common examples including gaming bots, whereby a player achieves a significant advantage by implementing some repetitive routine with the use of a bot rather than manually, or auction-site robots, where last-minute bid-placing speed may determine who places the winning bid – using a bot to place counterbids affords a significant advantage over bids placed manually.
Bots are routinely used on the internet where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots. A simple question and answer exchange online may appear to be with another person, when in fact it is simply with a bot.
While bots are often used to simply automate a repetitive online interaction, their ability to mimic actual human conversation and avoid detection has resulted in the use of bots as tools of covert manipulation. On the internet today bots are used to artificially alter, disrupt or even silence legitimate online conversations. Bots are sometimes implemented, for example, to overwhelm the discussion of some topic which the bot's creator wishes to silence. The bot may achieve this by drowning out a legitimate conversation with repetitive bot-placed posts which may in some cases appear to be reasonable and relevant, in others simply unrelated or nonsense chatter, or alternatively by overwhelming the target website's server with constant, repetitive, pointless bot-placed posts. These bots play an important role in modifying, confusing and silencing conversations about, and the dissemination of, real information regarding sensitive events around the world.
The success of bots may be largely due to the very real difficulty in identifying the difference between an online interaction with a bot versus a live human. Given that bots are relatively simple to create and implement, they are a very powerful tool with the potential to influence every segment of the World Wide Web... "source: Wikipedia"
Voting bots are what they are bots, can they be tricked? well lets try and do that.
This is an attempt to trap voting Bots, but might also work for the quick voters.
Do not feel bad voting for this post, I would like to hear your ideas on how to trick
bots to give you an up-vote. This might not work at all :/
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)
why are we not suppposed to upvote?
dantheeman
Imho try posting some random drivel on your account and see what % of it is upvoted compared to the legitimate content you post.
Then we can establish a baseline from where we can draw some relevant conclusions.
Downvoted for impersonation
I think voting bots which upvote posts by authors can be banned (let's say for 24 hours) by blockchain logic because we have all required data in blockchain. All other bots, not so scary.
Here is an Archive of Cryptocurrency App building Code on Github for anyone creating a Steemit app
https://steemit.com/steem/@marsresident/github-cryptocurrency-app-creation-archive
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