The Not So Subtle, Direct and Slightly Meta Question: How Do You Feel about Bots, Qurites?
Hi Qurites!
It's @fknmayhem here, from my forum/zapp/steepshot/whatever alt account. It's been a while since I posted here and while I'm working at a project, that also has to do with the fact that it has been quite the week in Steemit land!
Meta echo chamber, and sometimes also gossip kitchen, the Steem blockchain is the obvious topic at hand quickly went viral and I'm sure everybody saw at least one post around.
Of course, this is both meta and interesting because our little, cosy community of Qurites is also served by one of them, and since recently even offers a second one.
Yes, I'm talking about BOTS.
Bots in the Steem ecosystem. Premium upvote bots.
While the @Qurator bots are still small, and also limited to maximum one vote per day, and serve to cater to Qurites only, other bots briefly reached massive Steem Power and were capable to command bids of up to $100.
In recent days I've spoken to many people about the issue, and I wrote an extensive article about the issue on my main account, but I would also love to know how do you feel about the issue?
This is an open thread, a no-holds barred thread as such. There is no right or wrong answer to this topic. Please let me know how you feel about upvote bots, especially the more powerful ones we have seen.
Some questions/positions ideas to get you going:
- Would you resort to using them?
- Were those rates too expensive for you?
- I can afford those rates but I refuse to partake to that game!
- If you spend $50, or more, on an upvote services, do you do it for the financial reward or to become noticed?
- Do you think the to get noticed argument is a valid one or just creates a vicious circle of repetition?
- Are smaller bots fine, if bids/upvotes are capped both in amount and daily use?
- Do you think bots should be eliminated?
- Bots area necessary evil because there's not sufficient (manual) curation?
Don't be shy! Share your opinion in this thread. My curious, inquiring mind loves to know. 👊
Photo credit: Alex Knight on Unsplash
I will start of the discussion with some opinions. Firstly I used minnowbooster extensively in the past, but recently I have become unhappy. Sure they give exposure, but they also take away rightful curation rewards to people who find your content interesting. So I don't like the upvote bots in general
Let's get on the Qurator bot launched recently. Most of the funds Qurator generates goes to leases to support content written by Qurites. A requirement to be part of Qurator is to write good human content and get paid for it. It is a young project and could obviously use some revamp, but that is part of the growth process.
Now a problem the group faced was since all the money for the Qurator project was going to member support, there was no money to start initiatives, like for example get paid moderation of the groups content to ensure high quality. This is why the second Qustodian bot was created, you can see Qurator as the basic membership model with the bot as the premium service.
The mission and vision is to become a full-blown editorial service to filter out the wheat from the chaff.
It requires marketing, but in future if you don't want to waste your time looking through all the new posts, consider the spam, stuff you do not care about then you can simply filter posts by Qurator group members, which is a service on top of steemit we need to build, which again requires money for servers and so forth. You would even have a by content search.
So something like <is followed by Qurator, <tag is money. Instead of trolling through everything.
So each bot has a purpose, the support bot to support quality content, the paid bot to support future initiatives and expand the group. It is always to possible to consider a different funding model.
This is just the initial stab, you would be able to see on the Qustodian blog page, the bot can and will change in future. Simply because it is an upvote bot now, does not mean it cannot be molded to something else in the future.