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RE: The importance of FLOSS (The security point-of-view for beginners)
You might be interested to know that I have started a (very small at the moment) organisation called Steem FOSSbot for creating tools for Steem that are broadly defined as bots. I didn't use the L in FLOSS, but it's the same thing 😉
You can see it here: https://github.com/Steem-FOSSbot
I've got some ideas penned in the project-tracker project too, and open to anyone coming in to contribute and collaborate. 😁
Thank you very much for letting me know about your project. I'm very new to Steemit and even though I might know a thing or two about F(L)OSS, I don't know anything about Steem bots yet. I wonder whether it's even "ethical" to run such a bot. Wouldn't a bot give me an (unfair) advantage over normal people having to look for promising posts themselves? Doesn't that run against the whole idea of Steemit that people have to find interesting content on their own?
Your instincts are right, they're very contentious 😅
There's are arguments for and against and I'm exploring them as I create. What spurred me to create a F(L)OSS bot was that there were some "power" users that were running very successful bots but they were all closed source. In fact, as far as I know, there wasn't a very good open source bot until I create Voter.
I figured that as long as other people were creating them, I would use my own knowledge to create one that would at least level the playing field somewhat for those without the knowhow to create their own.
Further to that, I created it with features to allow you to model your own voting preferences using a scoring system and some basic stats analysis and NLP.
Of course it's completely up to each user whether or not they think it's cool to use. While they are a possibility (and I believe this is permanent, an argument I'll be making in a post soon) I will use my ability to facilitate others to participate.
Thank you very much for your elaborate answer. I'm looking forward to read your post about bots soon and followed you to make sure not to miss it. Good luck with your bot, even though for the moment I prefer to dig for content myself (until you or someone else convinces me about the advantages of using a bot ;-) ).