You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Voting Bot Algorithm Update for @biophil's bot
In defense of @wang, I don't actually see the difference between them and your bot. Both are designed to maximize curation rewards and front run manual curation, albeit wang uses various different methods. Your bot is certainly much smarter in frontrunning manual curators and curation guilds. It has cost manual curation guilds dearly insofar as having to scale down operations, but hey - it's the free market! Personally, I don't have a problem with either, but I guess from a manual curator's perspective it's all the same.
Oh sure, from the very start I've been nervous about the parasitic nature of my bot. So if @wang and I are two competing parasites, I have no problem at all grabbing as much of his food as I can and eating it myself (or selling it to my clients).
But I am definitely running into the parasite's dilemma: without @curie, it's not clear that my bot would be any good at all. I'm not specifically front-running @curie's curators, but @curie has made payouts on Steem so much more consistent that it has become relatively easy to predict which posts will earn well. The parasite's dilemma is that if I take too many curation rewards for myself, I'll kill my host organism - the manual curators won't be able to make any more money and won't have an incentive to keep finding good posts. Just as you've described. So we'll see how it plays out.
The problem is not your bot, or the rewards that you and your clients take specifically, but the bots that later latch on to you. As I'm sure you're aware, it's more than just @wang. There are a fair few large accounts that follow you. As your bot grows in popularity, there'll be more coming, of course. And as you know, frontrunning is a huge advantage the way the algorithm works, and your bot train could effectively slice a whale's curation rewards by half, and subsequently a curation guilds' revenues.
Anyhow, we'll see how it plays out! Perhaps you could consider submitting your bot's finds to #curie - there's a 8 Steem reward per voted post, but we could increase it if our whale supports' curation rewards go up again. Of course there's a lot more competition against human curators there, but even a few hits per day could increase your curation rewards manifold. If you're wondering what gives - it's the middle bots that come after you. They are the only ones who lose out. With our system, we directly share a large chunk of the whales' curation reward with the finder. Find me on Steemit.chat if that intrigues you - we could work something out. There are a couple other things I wanted to discuss with you as well.
I'd love to submit my finds to #curie. I'm contacting you on steemit.chat to talk about what that might look like.
From the POV of this content writer, the problem with bots, and I really don't understand the differences between this one and that one, is that there are upvotes without comment, without any indication of the post having been read. So I think the problem, if there is one, is not economic parasitism, but the submerging of any creative discussion, because the upvote of a swarm is made more meaningful a comment from a fellow creator.
That is indeed a major issue with Steemit now, but it's simply a result of it being a very, very small community. You'll find comments and feedback on popular stuff, but more niche material don't get much in the way of comments right now. That is normal and something that will fix itself over time as the community grows.
You're right, of course. And there is a lot of genuine popularity, as opposed to gaining attention as result of feeding more bots. It's perhaps easy not to realise that. Thank you.
Niche: you inspired a poem, just posted, hot off the press. I hope you enjoy it.