My thoughts on handling the bots
So recently, there has been a lot of talk about the increasing influence of bots on Steemit, and so I thought that I'd write my thoughts about it.
People have been talking a lot about the rising influence of bots on Steemit. One thing that almost everyone seems to hate is the fact that quite often, the vast majority of a post's payout comes from the bot upvotes, and that very often, the post doesn't seem to actually be a quality post. People look at all these plagiarised posts, or posts that don't have any real content get more upvotes than actual quality content.
But another reason there is demand for bots is that quality content from unknown authors doesn't get noticed and appreciated
Most people talk about the spammers profiting off of bots. But even genuine content creators use these bots to improve the visibility of their posts. The reality of Steemit(and most other social media platforms) is that the vast majority of quality content never gets noticed. Upvote Bots are a natural consequence of this. Most other platforms have nothing that lets you promote your posts as cheaply as is possible on Steemit thanks to these bots.
Even after all the talk about supporting minnows, Steemit still doesn't have a section specifically for small accounts. So as a minnow, when you see cents on a post, there is no reason you wouldn't use an upvote bot.
In fact I think that for a lot of people, the only reason Steemit is a viable use of their effort and time is because of this "subsidy" that they get from the bots. This is especially true of a platform whose main appeal is "make posts and earn money". People literally have come here because they believe that they will earn money off of their posts.
I think a lot of people, including genuine, quality content creators would leave Steemit if bots are banned and that "subsidy" goes away. So i think at this point,completely banning the bots isn't really something that's practical. That horse has long left the barn.
That, is the reason why so many people use bots. It's not that they don't see or that they ignore the fact that bots are used for malicious purposes. It's that they don't have any alternative to using bots. If you want to get rid of bots, you will first have to provide an alternative for the genuine users that works as well as bots. Otherwise, you'll lose the people along with the bots.
So what should be done about the bots?
While bots are used by genuine content creators, i don't think anyone believes that every vote that a bot gives helps a quality piece of content. So obviously, there are changes that should be made.
These are the changes that (I think) should be made:
1. Separate bot and human accounts, and make that separation clear in the UI
This is perhaps the most important change that should be made. When making an account, people should get a choice about whether they whether they want a human-controlled account or a bot. "Hybrid accounts" should not be allowed.
And it's perhaps even more important to make that distinction clear in the UI.
When people look at the upvote list of a post, they should be clearly able to discern whether the majority of a posts value comes from bots, or whether it comes from human accounts.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with using upvote/bid bots for promoting your posts, IF the fact that they have been used is properly disclosed in a way that is easy to understand. Sure, even today you can see the upvoter list of a post, but I think there is a better way to display that information.
What about the people who will lie? The ones who will make human accounts and then automate them?
2. Allow only the bot accounts to use the Steemit APIs to communicate with the blockchain. Human accounts must use either steemit.com, or any of the other frontends.
OK. This may seem like an extreme step. But I think this will really decrease that kind of abuse. This will also decrease spam comments like all the "nice posts" that you find all over Steemit. It will also stop all the bots that copy articles from the internet.
(If you are a human who makes "nice post" comments, I encourage you to make better, more meaningful comments.)
What about developers who are making apps for steemit?
They can make separate bot accounts for their apps that will be used for interfacing with the blockchain. Maybe we'll have "test bot accounts" with some usage limits that allow developers to use them when they are developing their apps, and then when the app/website goes into production, they use their own bot accounts to access the blockchain.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the publicly available information of a human account can't be accessed by anyone. I'm just saying that that information must only be accessible via a bot account (and anybody can make a bot account, so there will be no API usage restrictions or anything like that).
3. Ban bot accounts from making, replying or upvoting comments
I think at the core of all this discussion, is the concern that human interaction is being replaced by bots.
Banning bots from interacting with comments will do 2 things:
1. It will make the comments a place reserved for human interaction
There is no real need for bots to interact with the comments. And when there are no automated comments, human interaction will stand out.
So when you see a post with 10 comments, you know that those 10 comments are 10 real, actual humans talking to each other.
And bots still will be able to read comments (and posts), so @cheetah and all the spam catcher bots will still work.
2. It will make it easier to detect people who just use upvote bots to make money
If a post has a $50 payout with 80% coming from bots but no actual quality content, that will become clear very quickly because it will have no comments.
In this way, we can separate the people who use bots to promote their quality posts to a larger audience, and those who use them just to make money.
Overall, i think these changes will preserve the use of bots as a way to promote quality content, while discouraging people who use them just for making money.
What are your thoughts on these changes? Do you have any other ideas?
Sources
All images from Pixabay
Footer animation by @malos10
This is an interesting read @harshallele when I arrived at Steemit (more than a year ago) the money system and being bombarded with various requests put me off.
It took me eight months to return, I learned and read copious amounts on just how to work in Steemit, very time consuming.
Then people were sending amounts daily SBD0.001, asking you to use them for upvoting, bots arrived and that took another good period of time to learn (thank goodness for Discord and places I had accepted invitations to join.
Now bots are everywhere I doubt they can be taken off, certain of the guys building and developing communities with assisting others are in some cases checking your content before the invitation is sent out.
Having learned a bit more it is a difficult question, since some bots are really helping to boost you a little, with few whales around backing the upvotes, not much comes your way.... Irrespective of how original and good the content is.
An excellent place is to look as some of the post I have witnessed going into steemiteducation where folks are doing hours of work, with very little in return.
Sorry I am not able to give a solid answer to your question, thanks for an honest question to ponder.
thanks for reading my post!
Sometimes I see that bots upvoted my post and I don't use bots. These bots are either people who schedule upvotes and track my content, or bots who upvote me for I don't know what reason. I don't even know how THAT works, a bit that upvotes when I didn't ask it to, and its upvote is worth less than a penny.
I tried a bot but I can't afford it. I like the manual upvotes, like #ocd-resteem, and #voiceshares. There are people who will give upvotes and resteem content, they will rotate and give everyone a chance, but every now and then, perhaps several times a month, I will get a nice upvote from them. I find that a lof more encouraging, because someone saw my content and decided that they wanted to promote it. And if they don't, it's because they chose other content this time, but they will choose mine again soon. It's fun and more fair that way.
I think that bots should have a system where they detect the content of a post or something about it, if it's quality content or not.
I understand that a lot of people use bots to get upvotes, but I don't because I can't afford it. I rather make a bit less often those bigger amount but know that HUMANS upvoted me and resteemed me, not a bot, and that they did so because they liked the content, not because I sent them SBD. Plus bots, you need to compete with other people and it's highest bidder wins most, fewer bidders also mean you will get a bit more. Whereas when it's a human, everyone gets the same amount, you just won't get it every post, and I'm okay with that.
How can I distinguish bots from humans upvoting my content when it's a random bot upvoting me from a random account. I don't like the idea that people would think I'm getting bots to upvote me when I'm not (unless they are real account but are scheduled?).
The toher day I posted and literally 2 seconds later there was a full comment of "Nice post blablabla" and it's not possible that a human could type that fast and read that fast.
Anyway, something definitely needs to be done about these bots. Getting the convo going is defo a good start. Thank you for initiating it.
Thanks for reading the post!
I think bot usage for post promotion is fine, because otherwise you would never get noticed. But i don't think bots have any business commenting. If we remove bots from the comment section, we can ensure that the comments are all human. So you can judge the human interaction in a post from its comments.
That sounds like something that would help. Then I would know who actually read the article, or who just bot comments to get people to visit their page and posts.
I don't send bots anything, so other than those 2 test I did with 1 SBD each, from my end, bots don't vote on my content, except for people who use voting bots to schedule upvotes, which I still don't know how that works. I rather be there myself and upvote the person so they know I actually read their content, rather than schedule upvotes, but then the person enver know if I was truly there.
The content upvote bots is a consequence of it being more profitable consistently to curate than to produce content. This is just how it goes on Steemit
Ok, cool.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by harshal from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
Doesn't having @cheetah post a comment about (potential) plagiarism actually help human readers and commenters know when they are interacting with a potentially bogus post?
Maybe if there was a way to have comments that are purely to add metadata about posts like additional community added labels, or quality metrics, then bots could be restricted to adding only those.
Another thing that can be done is to actively encourage downvoting of posts purely for low quality and issues like that - instead of reserving it for abuse and spam. Some people call that "abuse of the rewards pool" anyway. I'm actually more inclined to have Steemit just rename "flag" back to "downvote" again and then lobby for metadata labels that can be voted on and be used to appropriately filter what Steemit.com and other Steem UIs show.