Botland

Bots are prevalent in all social media platforms and serve to automate and speed up different tasks for the people that run them. Some bots are designed with good intentions while others are designed to spread misinformation or to steal information from naïve people.

With the creation of Steem, we now have a social media platform that takes social media and combines it with cryptocurrency. But now, 2 years after the creation of Steem, we are seeing the creation of a new type of media. A platform that combines elements of Bitcoin and social media and creates a twisted child vastly different than its creators ever intended.

Invasive Species

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Bots are limited in scope and power with traditional social media platforms due to the platform having a central authority. If the bot or bots pose a threat to the control of their platform, this central authority can simply shut them down and remove them from the social network. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter come with the threat of censorship when the authorities of such networks deem it necessary.

But Steem, like Bitcoin is on a network that is preserved on hundreds of nodes and validated through a robust blockchain. Censorship of the blockchain is basically impossible. You simply have too many copies of the database to erase and you need significant amounts of stake (and thus money) to even control transactions on the network. With no central control, bad actors are much harder to contain.

Bots that become problems are no longer easy to deal with by applying a few changes to some algorithms and a couple of alterations to a central database. You simply can't erase bots from the network build on top of a blockchain. These bots are now free to exploit other users and mechanisms as they please and are only limited by the level of governance provided by the blockchain in question.

In Proof-of-Work blockchains, everyone runs a bot. It's call a miner. In Proof-of-Stake blockchains, most people with large holdings of a token run a bot. This allows them to stake their coin and earn something back in return depending on what actions they take. Witnesses on the Steem blockchain run specialized software to verify blocks. We could consider these programs as bots. But Steem attempts to do something different with part of the rewards. Reward content creators and curators with a slice of the pie.

A portion of Steem tokens are set aside in a rewards pool and are allocated through the Proof-of-Brain mechanism which allows accounts to allocate rewards to posts that are deemed worthy by those accounts. At initial glance, such an action would run contra to other blockchains. A system where the intent is to distribute the rewards based on human subjectivity and social consensus rather than mathematical rigidity and cold algorithms.

But like an invasive species, bots naturally would find their way into such an ecosystem that was designed to work without needing them. Rather than bots being the requirement, bots were now competitors to human beings. This is how all social networks work and why bots are so hated on other platforms. Bots create artificial noise that prevent people from easily communicating and propagating their ideas to as many people as possible.

And with our new ecosystem build on top of the Steem blockchain and rewards available such competition is pushed into the spotlight instead of the background. Bots provide efficiency while lacking authentic emotion while humans provide creativity but in broken separated intervals. Given the intent of the system, authentic connection and communication should be the goal, but the allure of money-hungry miners have brought bots from blockchains where they were welcome onto one where they compete for the resources with ordinary users.

And what have been the results of two years of experimentation? Initially creators and curators were given the opportunity to thrive and their populations were able to grow. But now more than ever, it seems like the bots are more integral to daily activity on the platform and authentic interaction is becoming endangered.

The Birth of Anti-Social Media

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All bots are not created equally. Depending on the intent of the designer and the implementation of the idea, bots can perform all sorts of tasks ranging from helpful to detrimental. But we need to remember the parents of Steem. Cryptocurrency and Social Media. Helpful bots should help users both engage in meaningful experiences and provide that user a means of deriving value in a secure network. Harmful bots do the opposite. Unfortunately given the current slant towards speculation in the space, the second parent (social media) is often completely forgotten by human users and bots alike.

Given the current speculative wave, a large majority of investors in the space are out to make money for themselves. They could care less about the potential of the technology to solve real-world problems and give meaning to people's lives. They care more about the bottom line and profitability. And naturally efficiency would be a target of such investors.

So we have our Steemit ecosystem and we have the initial group of users. But where's is the bias of these users? They are hungry for money rather than social interaction. To many users on the Steem blockchain, social media is a vehicle to earning money. Thus, their focus is not creativity, but efficiency and building a profitable engine that generates a nice income. The mindsight here is unhealthy and this ultimately gives the bots an advantage.

For bots thrive on automation and efficiency, but lack creativity. But if a majority of the userbase and accounts could care less, then the environment is ripe for their propagation among users within the community. So, we now have the ingredients for the creation of a new type of media. Something worse than spam, advertisement, and stupid cat videos. We have media created specifically used to achieve a selfish means of the author. Anti-social media.

You see spam, advertisements, and stupid cat videos are designed to invoke some response with some audience. And some degree of creativity and cleverness is involved to create such content (although it is admittedly a very low degree). With anti-social media, the content solely serves as a means to an end. A piece of content not to be observed, but to serve as a vehicle to connect an individual to some rewards. And given that the majority of users agree with such practice, you aren't going to get a lot of push back against those sorts of practices.

But you don't need bots to create anti-social media feeds. There are quite a few individuals that plagiarize content in order to upvote themselves and hope to steal a few votes from people that aren't paying attention. And given the environment, such action is profitable because most people could care less about anti-social media and are more focus on milking the system themselves. But bots can take advantage of this greed.

Botland

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A large majority of Steem-based social platforms utilize a similar codebase (condenser) and thus utilize the same built-in feeds that Steemit has. Trending. Hot. Active. New. These groups can be further filtered by certain tags, but such filtering is rather limited due to users being able to use multiple tags. Since New serves as a firehose and Active isn't really that useful and not used by Steemit anymore, we are left with the Hot and Trending tags. Both tags are heavily reliant on getting lots of stake-weighted support.

Because of the clunky user experience, time on the trending and hot tags is valuable. And given that the stay on the hot tag is very brief, the trending section is the only place where users can regularly have their content connect with new and fresh audiences who are just discovering the platform. Thus, it is very desirable to put content there in order to grow an account and to achieve the goal of making lots of money.

Trending at first was simply a place where whales simply picked content that suited their tastes or content that belonged to friends of theirs. Although flawed, this content had some social components to it and were written to be read by an audience. But now that's not necessarily the case.

Today trending is Botland. Look at the top voters on these posts. All bid-bots. What are bid-bots? The natural evolution of greedy investors, ruthless efficiency, and adopting mining techniques from other blockchains. Essentially what has been created are ruthless monsters that take the money of profit minded individuals and only vote for their content.

Rather than vote for content that is the most sincere, the most authentic, and the best quality; votes are given to individuals with the greatest desire for attention and profit. Botland is a shining city of the rich and the rest of the population is left with the scraps in underground ghettos that are hard to find and hard to filter the gems from the trash.

What is left is a mechanism to elevate content regardless of the content itself. Anti-social media now has a way to rise to the top and the social part of the platform is choked off and starved and growth of the platform stagnates. In Botland, bots serve as central authorities of content and must be bribed in order to be granted access to the gated utopia.

In Botland, the investors and the owners of the bots get rich as they have essentially built efficient mining pools that outcompete regular users when left to allocate rewards to different users. In Botland, owners regularly spread propaganda about how great their machines are and talk about how many people they help. In Botland, they take credit for contributing to quality content and helping grow the blockchain when they are choking out honest opinion and thoughtful artists who simply want a platform that allows them to express their advice without dealing with central authorities.

But in Botland, the central authorities are no longer CEOs concerned about the appearance of a platform. The central authority is a bot that doesn't care about you. They simply grant access to the people willing to pay the most. Social media doesn't matter anymore, running a bidbot operation is simply a better social mining algorithm than treating the platform as a social media platform. Steem is an anti-social media blockchain where some individuals still care enough to produce good stuff, but such people are an endangered species where extinction isn't completely out of the question.

Requiem For A Vision

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Recently, Steemit co-founder Dan Larimer wrote a piece describing the limits of governance in the crypto-space. But more importantly, he lays out three premises for which he bases his work on. The latter two are solid arguments, but his first point has the aura of someone naively optimistic towards the people around him.

The vast majority of people have good intentions

If this was the case, Botland would be a theoretical state that simply wouldn't occur because the good people of Steemit would see how such structures are harmful to meaningful social interaction and effective cryptocurrency security practices (keeping stake and power decentralized). But Botland seems like an inevitability and a dystopic state where people's voices no longer matter, their wallets do.

People aren't fundamentally good. People aren't fundamentally bad. People are animals and want to survive so they can propagate the species. Because of this, people are inherently selfish and greedy.

Perhaps the potential collapse of Steem and the growing corruption of the vision of the platform helped Dan to leave Steem. Dan seems like an optimistic person and one who is set on achieving his vision. He knows what happens when such platforms go rotten and greed overtakes the system.

The more corrupt a group is the faster it will die.

If there is any good left on the Steemit blockchain, they should care about the well-being of the platform and will try to avoid such a collapse from happening. But with the rampant greed in the cryptocurrency space, death seems like a pretty plausible option. Not to say that such a platform will not be revived, but even then it will have lost to bigger and better organized projects.

But the vision of combining social media and blockchain technology is dying. May we take the moment to acknowledge the potential and may we now recognize that such a vision was simply an obtainable utopia as those with power are always corrupted and turn into the monsters they swear they would never become.

I'll be here in the underground if anybody needs me. You might not find me buried in the waves of anti-social media and automated responses, but one day, maybe we can leave Botland for something better.

Sources

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The Limits of Crypto-Economic Governance