RE: Potential solutions to stop, restrict or disincentivize bots & alternatives for better bots - 🤖 BOTS! 🙀 Act 3
Although a long post, you created a very good post explaining what is possible and what is not possible. That I think should give more insights to those readers who do not know how Steem and Steemit are build. At least it gave me a good insight. BTW, thank you for mentioning me and including a quote from my comment to your previous post on bots. It gives me a good feeling, my contribution is appreciated and actually used :)
Regarding this post, I'm not sure if I can add something other than that I think indeed that as much as possible we need to technical enforce rules rather than by culture. Before implementing changes, we may try to align the community in acting as if we would be enforced by technology, in order to get practical field experience and determine if the results are indeed what we would expect and determine if the results are good (or not) for Steemit as a service and more importantly, for the community and its envisioned growth.
I repeat myself, when I state that I opt for read only bots, with some exceptions if that is possible; The exceptions are for instance @cheetah and the twitter bot placing a comment. But bots shall not be able to vote indeed. How this can be implemented is beyond my expertise. Since my knowledge on how exactly reputation is effected, I cannot comment on the proposed implementation. The comment of @l0k1 looks valid to me, but also here I think I have too little knowledge to understand it completely. I hope other readers and commenters are more equipped to understand what a good approach is and what the consequences are.
I thought what you were saying was in line with what a large number of people think and it was great chatting to you, thanks for the quote 😄
This is certainly what the creators thought. You're probably right, there is probably never going to be a completely dominant culture here, and if there is there will always be a minority who can significantly disrupt things.
Leading from this, there can be no exceptions with this technology, no privileged bots such as @cheetah. All must play by the same rules. It makes it really challenging to make rules which fit everyone and everything, and why the best witness are always calling for KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid!
I really don't think bots can be prevented from voting, and there are good reasons to allow it. I think people who object to that usage (like you do) should focus on disencentivizing that particular behavior and / or the advantage bots have over humans. That's really the point of the post. The vote rate limiting feature is already something that does that. My Hard fork solution above would it. More ideas for this are needed and to get the devs and witnesses on board. Not easy but I think there would be a lot of general user support, as I said in the post.
Thanks again for your comment and engaging with me in conversation on this topic 😊 🙌
Lets indeed assume that we stay/create an environment where bots can play a role, I would try and still stick to the rule bots:
When allowing bots to place posts, this can be used for external created content to inject into Steemit as well, think of ezine using Steemit as just another channel of interacting with their followers.
When allowing bots top place comments, this helps bots like @cheetah, or anybody who wants to leave comments when upvoting or even downvoting content, manually, reducing the work required in curation and securing Steemit (especially for downvoting activities).
I would not allow bots to vote though. Let voting always be a manual activity.
I have no idea if this can be technically created, but that would be the model I would opt for.
Can you please re-read the post? I talk about how we cannot have what you are proposing because there is no distinction made between human and bot accounts.
That somehow I forgot again, thanks for reminding!
That makes it indeed a complex topic. Since not voting for bots, means no voting for humans. I suggested some weeks ago to look into behavioural analyses. Through such analyses find the bots and block them. In the telecommunication space, and in particular in the SMS space, they try to solve a problem they have with advertisers using backdoors to get there push SMS into the telcos networks. These backdoors are either free of charge, or offered to them for a very very low price. Systems are created looking at logging data of SMS senders and try to figure out who are these backdoors users and block them when identified. This may not be the next step for Steemit to implement, but could be step 2. First step is indeed to de-incentify the bots as you are trying to get information and discussions going through this post.
I think there are some very simple markers for bot activity that could be used because bots behaviour is usually very repetitive, periodic and / or does large batch jobs that would be impossible for a human.
I have marked an idea to create a simple web app to detect this stuff which I'd like to do some weekend I have free. Of course the great irony is that this would actually be a bot!
There is no official stance against bots for Steemit Inc., I think they in fact want them, so I would not expect any systematic de-bot-ifying from them. It's only some (maybe a lot of) users which are against them.
As you know, I'm not against bots, and as you state, the community as a whole, or the witnesses and Steemit Inc as a subset, may not want to force bots out of the network. Analysing bots, ie read only as you name them, are very good I think.
The effect of blocking bots, or reducing their influence when used in a 'bad' way, will result into more intelligent bots, ie trying to circumvent the bot detection algorithms. The good thing from this is that it'll create more intelligent bots. The 'bad' thing is that it requires constant work on the analysing bots. But, this gives good things again, since more intelligent bots may be applied to other social networks, or big data environment which gives a business opportunity and revenue opportunity for those who actually create the technology.
If @l0k1 's proposal is implemented or something similar, it would be possible for those disagreeing with bots or certain kinds of bots to have more power to oppose them. But then again, under his proposal it would cost something for the opposition. 😅
If such a situation were to arise and bots were to have to adapt to avoid detection, it would mean they would have to act more "human-like", which would by definition reduce their advantage and impact to the level of human, assuming there are no exploitable loopholes (there almost certainly will be, but they might be small). That would be a significant win for the bot opposition!
And you're right, and pressure to innovate could have net positive effect.
Just before I read your last comment to this threat, I read the entire threat you had with @l0k1. Very interesting proposal made indeed.