Busy.org Launches Its New Bot Aimed at Rewarding Its "Influencers"

In the world of Steem(it) it is very difficult to imagine a life without the omnipresence of bots. While this may not yet be a precursor to the singularity, as Steemians we all know bots and see them everywhere. Especially upvote bots.

Some of us actively use bots, both to kickstart their posts to the Hot and/or Trending page or to power up faster. While here at theSteemObserver we have split feelings about these services, we have also come to accept them and may nowadays occasionally even make use of one on some days old posts on our personal account, also to reward our upvoters with slightly better curation rewards.

On Steemit, no week day passes without the introduction of a new bot. Everybody can make a bot and several open source bots are available to the community of Steemians One-click deploy bots even.

As such it is no surprise that also the more popular services, and Steem(it) platforms, are looking into creating their own bot, even if only to reward their users. And exactly that did @busy.org, the popular Steem interface.

A Bot with a Twist

Busy.org's bot comes with a twist, by which we do not only mean to emphasize that the bot is free, which in itself is a premium feature already.

The busy.org bot is aimed at users who use the busy.org interface and tag their post with #busy. The busy tag needs not be the first one. That's how nice the crew over at busy.org is: no beneficiary charge for posting through its interface and the opportunity to receive a free bot upvote when posting through the interface all without putting busy promotion middle and center.

So what's the twist?

The twist about the busy.org bot is that it aims to reward influencers by upvoting Steemians with a higher reward based on the SP held by their followers. Thus Steemians who are lucky enough to have some whales and orcas follow them will benefit more.

Additionally, every user can be upvoted twice per day.

Of course, there is a lower limit as well. Users with less than 500 combined SP following them are exempt from the bot's upvoting process.

Well-Meant but Flawed

One of the biggest concerns within the Steem community is to highlight great content from minnows. Several curation projects exist to do this, as well as bots.

Often it has proven difficult for bot operators to find the perfect middle-ground between helping minnows and the often also required need to also occasionally self-upvote in order to maintain power and also boost their own SP. As an observer, we have noticed several instances in which bot operators have been called out for this. At times the whole situation has felt like a can't win setup to us.

While busy's new bot is most certainly a novel take on rewarding Steemians, we see two issues with it.

First, and foremost, this bot will benefit whales more than less wealthy users. This simply because most whales tend to be followed by more influential accounts than minnows or dolphins. While it would be very arbitrary to do so, busy.org could easily avoid this situation by implementing an upper limit on who can receive upvotes from its bot.Just like new accounts are mostly exempt too. We aren't entirely sure that busy.org should create a service which boosts minnows more, although it is an ongoing issue on Steem, and it would definitely be awesome to see the busy team once again spearhead positivity with an updated algorithm which rewards more recent users more.

The second problem we see with busy's bot is a darker one. Humans be humans, and thus when money is involved, or at least at stake, the darker sides of humans tend to come to the fore. This became very obvious when Steemian @paulag recently published her data analysis about Ned's delegated SP. We are not sure a solution to counter this problem exists, other than that we hope that most whales aren't that cheap.

While we believe in the good of mankind, it would be naive to think that there won't be Steemians who will offer whales, and orcas, a financial reward to follow them. This will obviously be a small number only, yet it is a problem created by the otherwise awesome bot-service offered to the busy.org Steem community.

At the time of writing, the busy.org bot has around 180k SP, 150k of which delegated to it. This results in an upvote of around $18 at 100% VP.

UPDATE

We planned to post this article via the busy.org interface, with its awesome block based editor, but sadly couldn't publish the aritcle.

Thus we reverted back to good ole' Steemit. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯