There is a little project I'm working on regarding steemit bot development in python. A little project that started as an idea for a simple boilerplate core for stats bots based on the steem python API, but that is moving towards providing an alternate python API implementationvcentered around use with the twisted framework and non-bleeding-edge versions of Python. This blog post however won't be about my in progress steem library work. I want to talk about a series of ready to use bots meant to be run by regular steemit users. A series of so called "away" bots.

Away bots

So what is an away bot? There are many types of bots. Some are interactive waiting for you take invoke their services, some just process data all day and produce weekly stats. Some are useful, others anoying or even arguably harmfull. Some run on their own dedicated steemit account, others piggybag on their owners accounts.

An away bot is a piggybag type of bot of sorts, meant to run only when its owner is "away". More specifically, a bot that only interacts with the steemit blockchain by means of "votes" and only activates when its owner hasn't used his/her voting power for a while, leading to a voting strength of (almost) 100%.

The bot is mute most of the time. Activates when account voting strength exceeds, maybe 98.5%, stays active untill it can make a single vote, than goes mute again.

You could use an away bot to auto-vote on post from your friends when you are away. You could even try to make your away bot smart, using strategies to maximize your curation awards while you are away, for example voting for posts with a high probability of attracting votes from one of the bigger fish, but then, that is not what this post is about. The type of away bot I want to discuss here is the down-vote away bot.

Flag vs down-vote

One difficult to understand concept about negative value votes is the difference between upvote attenuating downvotes and reputation damaging flags. As both use the exact same action from the giver of the down-vote, it is odd how context makes the difference between a positive effect that helps fighting abuse or behaviour decremental to the platform and it's user, and a negative and aggressive effect of reducing the target's reputation to the level of effective invisability. I want to argue that an away bot should take care to never ever resort to flagging and damaging reputation of others. This can be difficult to achieve due to other people's bots and race conditions, but I'm working on measured fractional downvotes and checking of active votes to ensure that. The base rule, never let your action, assuming parallel bots used by others, vote the projected pay out of the post at hand to a below zero level. If it reaches a below zero level, you are no longer attenuating a false upvote, you are damaging an account, and that's just not cool. The projected strategy is:

• Get the value of the false upvote
• Subtract the value of downvotes younger than that upvote.
• Calculate the required down-vote percentage needed for a down-vote of at least 7.5% and at most 19.5% of the remaining value.
• If the required percentage for 19.5 is less than 25% or if the required percentage for 7.5 is more than 50%: don't down-vote .
• If the required percentage for 19.5 is more than 50%, down vote at 50%, otherwise, down-vote with the required percentage for 19.5.

This strategy helps in two ways. It keeps your bot from doing damage to the reputation of people, and it keeps you from futilely countering a $200 worth upvote with a $0.02 down-vote while exposing yourself to spurious retaliation flags by huge fish.

Note: you really still need to have some cojones to run any other the below down-vote bots. There is a culture of retaliation and intimidation on steemit when it comes to the constructive use of attenuating downvotes. And don't expect the bigger fish to have your back. If you decide to contribute your voting power to a cleaner steemit eco system, you expose yourself to risk, the above rules will attenuate that risk, but they will not take the risk away.

Some bot targets

Here is the list of targets for downvoting away-bots that I currently plan to package with my library:

• Upvotes by page owners on comments by comment bots.
• Upvotes on comments by the author of the comment on a page by an other author that the upvote didn't bother to upvote.
• Upvotes by upvote bots targeted at a page of the person paying for the upvote bot (proxied self upvotes) at a moment that the page itself is more than a few hours old.

This list is still a bit short at the moment. I feel everyone on steemit should have the possibility to exercise their democratic right with respect to running bots like these, but bots that allign perfectly with their own ideas of what constitutes abuse and what constitutes a false upvote. For that reason I'm asking everyone to comment on the following question:

What downvoting away bot would you like to use? If it's not listed, please describe the away bot you would like me to built.

Create a new issue for a new away-bot

If there is any away bot you would like me to build, just add the spec to the steempersist issue list. Not completely sure yet how it works, but I believe @utopian-io has an issue filing option you might want to look into. (If there is anything needed from me to start accepting issues for my project through @utopian-io , please comment below, I'll try and comply with their rules).

Oh, and if you happen to be a big fish who's business model might suffer from me picking up building one of these away bots, I respond much better to reason or even bribes, than to threats, at least as far as my steem development efforts are concerned. Explain to me why I shouldn't write a particular bot. Propose an alternative addressing the same concern the bot would address but in a way that doesn't clash with your business model. Unless your business model revolves around spam or blatant reward pool rape, a decent alternative bot proposal addressing the same fundamental concern is more likely to succeed than (threatening with) flags.

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