How I want to make my first bot for Steemit ( @normaluser explained )

in #business8 years ago (edited)

This post is for everybody interested in learning, what a bot is ( including myself )

I have a second account called @normaluser - I want to make him a friendly and helpful robot.
A robot is a machine, that works on it's own.
I want to set up @normaluser as a machine to work on Steemit - That's called a 'bot'.

As a project it's ment to show, how anybody could make a bot and make his ideas work for him.

The machine first needs an engine and that will probably be a dedicated laptop computer running on an Operating System called Ubuntu.
It might be better to use a virtual machine, but for nostalgia and simplicity I will begin like this.

In the 90's, I had a Computer running Windows 3.11 - and that had a great feature:
It would let you record Makros.

Similar to an Audio or Video recording, you could record all Mouse and Keyboard Input and then replay it.
You could replay it a million times on loop and make your computer do a task over and over again.

You could press 'record',

  • open a Text file in the Editor,
  • click in the middle of it,
  • type 'Hello !',
  • save the file, close the Editor and

then press 'stop'

If you ran this recorded Makro 1 million times on loop, and sped it up as fast as possible, it would have created a useless, but big text file faster, than any human could have done by Mouse and Keyboard.
It's a program - kind of pointless, but it worked !

Anybody could create a machine with it.

As a kid, I once created a perpetuum mobile on my computer, only to find out, that a machine, stuck in an infinite loop - is not necessarily a good thing. It made my computer crash.
But ever since then, I was fascinated by the possibilties of computer programs.

Some programs will outlive their creators and already have.
Some bots will live on, long after their human programmers have died.
Isn't that fascinating ? Like Commander Data from Star Trek ?

Jump to 2016 and now I am here, trying to make a bot for Steemit, that does something profitable.
Before I can figure out how to program it - which doesn't seem to be too difficult - let's not worry about details, at this point - I need to figure out what he should be doing, first.

I would like him to be a social bot and in the best case be as friendly as possible.
I also want him to make a profit for himself.
You could help me find some funky algorithms for @normaluser !

To give you a rough idea:

  • He could vote on 1 random post every hour: Lottery bot
  • He could make 1 'Hello Steemit !' post tagged introduceyourself, then reply 'Hello !' on every comment
  • He could vote for your last post automatically, when you transfer SBD to him
  • He could decide for you: when you asked him 'A or B', he could randomly pick one: Oracle bot

I could think of much more sophisticated behaviour patterns that would be helpful and I'm sure, you could, too. I hope, I could explain a little better, how I will make this bot work and why I'm not worried, that it will work.

I want to make my first bot with the help of my own little network on SteemIt and you could be part of it - let me know !

Thank you for reading,
have a great day !

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Sorry @felixxx I am not a bot fan.

I think they take value from the community rather than build it..

I would however love to find out how to create one from a technical point of view.

Point is, whether you like them or not, bots will play their part here on steem. Insofar it's more a question of the platform design, to make building valuable robots more profitable than the operation of 'evil' bots.

bots are just simple programmable agents you can get to automate things for you. it is only a little more advanced to make apps. if you can make a bot, you have the beginnings of being able to make apps.

So you don't like Commander Data ? Why ?

He could never tell a joke. Lol.

He could. With a special chip he could. But there were issues with this addon :)

I forgot about the chip implant...it was a long time ago

https://au.pinterest.com/pin/230105862183102921/

actually, i am not a big watcher of star trek but i remember data making the odd joke.

Thats the point, he tried and tried again with his jokes but not until the end he learned how to tell one. They say you dont know a language until you can tell a joke in it.

Why Ubuntu? There is a steemd for Windows, I think ...

Yes, I am late. Busy days :)

ubuntu because i dream of running these bots on small computers - maybe smartphones - so i can take my bot for a walk or on a holiday

Cool. I have an ages old laptop with 1 MB of RAM lying somewhere and collecting dust.

What are the minimum requirements for running a bot? I guess they must be much smaller than for running a node or even mining...

Well your machine needs to be able to go online and somehow connect to steemit ...
I'm trying to use piston ...

For a simple auto vote algorithm you don't need a lot of CPU power, obviously, thats an easy job.
At this point I'm just struggling how to work with piston.
It seems to me the most promising way to do it though.

Oh yeah and 1 MB will not be enough.
but a raspberry pi could do it i guess ....

Sorry, 1GB , of course :) Running Windows XP. I can format it and install Ubuntu.

I was a sysadmin on linux servers years ago so I still remember a bit about bash :)

Hi felixxx , to be hornest i am not a big fan of bots, a bot never can give a good answer. When i started weeks ago, Steemit was full of bots, most of them are all gone because about the new reputation system. I was getting pissed of of all the bots which where commenting bullshit all the time.
Wang was the only bot which helped my right on the beginning with nice tips, but i didnt realize by that time he was a bot.

Wang was the only bot which helped my right on the beginning with nice tips, but i didnt realize by that time he was a bot.

I miss @wang

Ich schau mir das gerne mal an weil mich der technische Teil sehr interessiert. Ansonsten finde ich reale Accounts auch sinnvoller.

Mee too. Waiting for some applications and results. And learning :)

I'd love to see a bot which would allow you to schedule posts...Now that would be useful! :)

that would be easy to implement in both windows and linux, in windows you use task scheduler to run a script, and in linux, cron.

I expect the steemit apps to offer that ...

let me test sth ...

test once more ...

test again ...

As a programmer I am very interested in these topics. I will surely follow your approach! What I found out, that you can use some plugins to use python on a visual studio license. There you can put the libraries in, provided by steemit. I did not had the time to go further so far... ( I got a 700 pages Python book here... but not taken a look so far).

check my blog ..
you are 3 days behind ....

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