You bring up an interesting point when it comes to scammers abusing bots to mislead members here into thinking their scam is trending because it's popular and since they're mislead into thinking the scam is popular, they're more likely to fall for it. That's really bad for business here, especially during a time when these scam ads are being banned from the big players on the internet like facebook and google; and for good reason. That ban gives this platform the perfect opportunity to truly shine in this world where cryptocurrency is getting so much bad press, but instead we have this bidbot nonsense holding us all back with the potential to turn the place into a garbage dump of ads nobody wants.
Any time a promo bot is used, the post should be marked as an advertisement otherwise both the blogger and owner of the bot is technically guilty of false advertising and that typically means paying fines.
Those running the bots are quite careless and it is laughable. Since those promoting something like a ponzi scheme often take the fall along with the creators of the scam, all it would take is one scam post to put the bot owners behind bars since they are technically promoting the scam.
I think these bots are a failed experiment that will only lead to more problems down the road not only for Steemit but every single investor. They're bad for business, bottom line.
Unfortunately how do you block bots in a decentralized manner? And some bots are good like childfund or crpytoempire.
The Steem blockchain is decentralized. Steemit and all of these other sites and apps are businesses. There are things that good for business and things that are bad for business. If you ran a manufacturing plant and one of your robots was malfunctioning, you'd fix it before it can cause more damage. This is simple stuff.
Again you can't block bots you prevent it from being seen on trending and stuff. Even facebook and twitter has bots. You can make bots harder to be made but not blocking.
When robots take over the world; the people who said, "Nothing can be done," will be to blame.
Well that is point nothing can done :(
Unless you make humans even stronger than robots by genetic and robotic enhancements.
So we can apply this strategy to bots by making bots harder to run and giving human aka manual votes more power/incentives
That's a start.
As of this writing, there's a gentleman on trending who introduced himself at the cost of around $400 US. That behavior creates a paywall of $400 just to say hello on this platform. That paywall only exists because of these bots and those who run them. If this place wants to be a disruptive technology and see 1 billion members using various apps and sites, the playing field must remain accessible to as many walks of life as possible. That can't happen now. Not like this. People can say hello anywhere else in the world, for free. So, something needs to be done. It's getting out of hand and it's painfully obvious where it will lead. People come and leave before they even get started.
What I am more confused was that the guy is from Bangladesh an area where bitcoin is illegal. The guy has guts to show his photo.
Follow the money. Look at the wallet. It'll raise a few eyebrows. Certainly raised mine.
Allow the Steemian users to vote for "approved" apps, just like they do for witnesses.
Restrict upvoting to only those apps.
Require those apps to have two-factor authorization before doing upvotes.
How do you tell the diff from apps? I guess a common code can be made but... I not a coder i guess it could work.
Plus upvote selling can still be done even if you block apps.
Just like your wallet on Steem has a key and a secret, APIs give registered apps a key and a secret.
They key is to prevent bot upvotes.
True. But then wouldn't destroy the free market by requiring users to vote for apps to be allowed to be activated on the blockchain? Also upvoting selling can still happen even if you block the apps
My the community choosing which apps are valid, it encourages the free-market to build good app.
Did you miss the point about two-factor authentication for doing the upvotes. So, you would have to do a "I am human" action after you click upvote in order for the upvote to go through.
Oh a captcha-unfortunately their are programs that bypass that. It be like like adnetwork vs adblocker. But it would make it very very costly for bots to use it. Plus you can do a POWCAPTCHA+I am human captcha hybrid service to enhance the feature. And I guess community apps voting will work. But how many upvotes will it need to be active. Or will be like voting on apps=bandwidth can use. More Votes on app=more bandwitch
Have you seen Binance's slider?
If there has to be a percentage votes from the community for approval, that might encourage developers to promote their app more. And then we probably should see a percent usage from the apps too, which could be handled by keeping track of which app submits the entry.
Honestly, at first I preferred to restrict upvoting to only Steemit, but apparently people cried about it not being decentralized. So, that's why I suggested approved apps and community voting. However, the proof is in the pudding and things are never really decentralized on a social media app, so I say, that it should ONLY be Steemit with upvote ability and 2FA for verification.
2fa isn't only captchas. Replying to a text with the code in it to be able to vote would be a pain, but it would eliminate bots without their own phone.