RE: Potential solutions to stop, restrict or disincentivize bots & alternatives for better bots - 🤖 BOTS! 🙀 Act 3
I think requiring on-going activity to enable voting would be harmful to the platform in the long term.
I have used theoldreader.com daily as an RSS reader since they launched and Google Reader before that, back as far as maybe 2006 or 2007. Many people there read and "Like" but don't share links. I think this type of application would be a perfect use case for the steem block chain (in fact, I e-mailed the support team at theoldreader a couple months ago to suggest that they might want to make use of steem - though I never heard back from them). Also, many people simply prefer not to comment or post, but would still want to vote.
The requirement to post regularly in order to vote would fence out people and applications like that, which would limit steem's growth potential.
The read-only bot that you discuss is basically just a recommendation engine.
Sure, it'd be fine with that, but I don't see any benefit from preventing the bot from just pressing the vote button. I should be free to vote my influence using any criteria I want. Maybe my bot correlates certain keywords with a rising steem price and decides to vote for those. It doesn't need to read the article to decide that the post brings value. Why should it have to wake me up in the middle of the night to press the upvote button for it?
Up-vote doesn't mean I like everything about an article. It means I like something about an article enough to want to say so. Bots have an advantage because they are more productive, and with the right incentives in place, they'll eventually be better than people at surfacing good content. Instead of trying to hobble and discourage them, we should encourage them to improve, which is why I am totally on board with the continuing need for competition among bots.
I think you are correct about restricting the usage of Steem, it certainly limits the applications. At this stage it could be too much, we don't know the full potential of Steem yet.
However the restriction may not be too large on the kind of applications that use Steem as a social network first and foremost. Don't forget that this was the original and express intention of the creators.
Of course the read-only bot is a recommendation engine, or a filter as I prefer to call it. To be clear I'm not saying bot voting should be disallowed, I go to lengths to show it cannot be done without corrupting Steem. Rather that some bots may not offer auto-vote features but the rest of the stuff that usually goes with them, i.e. the filters.
Glad you agree with bot competition, rare to see that stated 😉
I read about a construction design method that was used at some college a while back. Rather than lay down sidewalks between the new dorms and classes, they left everything unpaved. Then, when the students wore the paths into the ground, that''s where they laid the walkways.
Here at steemit, I see soo much effort in the opposite direction. Every time someone finds a way to succeed, instead of emulating it or competing with it, an overwhelming chorus of voices emerges cheering for the avenue to be blocked. I know you didn't say that bot voting should be disallowed, but I suspect that's what many people are thinking when they read about a read-only bot. And you sort-of did imply that bot voting should be stigmatized (which surprises me, given fossbot).
I feel like this post was much less clear than I was intending 😭
I recognize that bots are a perceived problem by many. All I intend to do is take their concerns seriously and explore certain realities and potential realities, showing why they must be allowed for and teasing out the impact if they were to be prohibited.
Indeed, I'm in favor of them, if my position is in any way unclear. I will reread this post and make a few clarifying edits, you're not the only one!
By the way, absolutely beautiful metaphor for experimentally lead directioning. You should do a post about that, it's powerful.
I don't know what you're referring to exactly when you say Steem tends to go in the opposite direction. Do you have any examples?
I'm probably reacting to the comments and the general sentiment towards bots as much as to what you wrote, so maybe I read too much between the lines. If so, I am sorry for that.
I see that you joined in December. Maybe the other dust-ups I'm thinking of happened before that, but there has been high drama a couple times when people managed to find innovative ways to consistently get to the top of the trending page. Specifically, @steemsports, might have blossomed into a full-fledged prediction market if they hadn't been driven away to their own web site (or maybe they still will, I lost track of them when they left.), and @steemvoter was also bullied into near silence by a mob for trending too often.
And lastly, of course I think bots will be one of steem's best features, but there has been an informal anti-bot campaign on the site since I joined in July.
I hope your approach builds some bridges on this topic. Maybe you already saw my on bots series, but I'll mention it in case it contains any helpful thoughts.
I am not a vintage user, it's true 😅 I've definitely missed some important things. I was around for some of the objection to @steemsports. I actually really like what happened there, people objected and had the power to make their objections felt. Sounds ideal.
I was also there for the @steemvoter objections and personally supported those objections.
I thought you were referring to the "management" moves in the opposite direction. If the users on the platform object, that their objections have some consequence is good in my opinion.
It's the "crabs in a bucket" thing playing out as the platform designers intended. From the whitepaper:
I also think that bots could become one of the best things on Steem. We just need more variety and importantly, more of them open source! I intend to build bridges so to speak, thanks for this note.
I did not see your series, I missed it! That's one of the main reasons I created the fossbot, to find stuff like this. Followed and will read these now.