The curation bots are taking over
There's an interesting dynamic that I've noticed on Steemit lately: bots are taking over curation.
Many Steemit users who have lots of Steem Power (aka whales) aren't manually curating content; they're instead letting a bot do it for them. Curation bots are identifying users who have made big payout posts in the past, and taking into consideration factors like the number of words, headers, pictures, and links to determine how to allocate upvotes.
There's one fundamental reason curation bots make sense for whales and it was covered broadly in @dantheman's recent post: Steem users are financially incentivized in the short-term to use bots for curation. Each user is allocated an amount of Steem power to use for upvoting and upvoting earns users curation rewards. For a minnow like me, I earn very little for curating so it's not worth it to implement a bot. But for whales, there's meaningful money to be earned. As an example, in the past 7 days a whale named @smooth has made over $8K worth of Steem power from curation (see his curation rewards here).
Voting on posts via curation bots is literally free money for whales in the short-term. As a whale, you can simply turn the bot on, let it do its thing and earn money. If you're a Steem whale who is not upvoting, you're missing the opportunity to earn more Steem power.
The problem
You may notice users that, as a result of being identified by whale curation bots as "high potential users", consistently earn significant money for posts. I recently came across @sean-king's feed and he earned over $1K for posting simple photos. Even I (a minnow who's had a few $1K+ posts) can make a few dollars per post currently, thanks to the fact that I somehow got identified by a few whale bots. I tested with a simple photo yesterday from my view in Sardinia (see here. By the time you're reading this, there's a good chance that @hr1 has upvoted by now :)
An obvious potential problem here is that we could see the quality of content stagnate or degrade as a result of the whale curation bots recognizing bad content and missing good content. I'm skeptical of AI consistently rewarding good content on the level of a talented human anytime soon and the bots are clearly now missing good content like this in favor of basic photos of a random woman.
Is this really a bad thing?
There are two reasons the curation bot invasion may not be a bad thing:
1.) Whales may recognize that in the long-term curation bots destroy the value of their Steem power and so they turn the bots off.The beauty of participating in a social network that we all have an ownership stake in is that if we're financially motivated and have a long-term perspective, we're all likely to act in the best interest of the group.
2.) My assumption that bots will be bad at recognizing great content for the foreseeable future could be flawed. AI is progressing quickly. The OpenAI project is training a bot on Reddit currently and who know's how quickly things progress in the coming years. Maybe bots will get even better than humans at recognizing good content?
What do you think? Is the curation bot invasion on Steemit a bad thing or is it just a natural evolution of the platform?
I think #steemit-bots are bad for the #steemitplatform AND for the #steemitcommunity. If the only purpose is to make money, it's all just going to be capitalist bots and idiocracy.
In using other algorithmic systems (Nuzzel being one example), I'm not interested in the top stuff. I can get that anywhere. I'm looking fir the edge stuff that not many people are looking at yet. I have yet to find a better solution than following humans I think are interesting.
On the other hand, what is the difference between a bot and the algorithm that powers trending, or hot? Might as be rewarded for building a different interface on top of Steem that gives users better tools to find good stuff?
The feedback loop of human interactions and bots together is going to be interesting.
"if the purpose is to make money, it's all just going to be capitalist bots and idiocracy."
I don't think this is necessarily true. Financial incentives are important for all digital currency platforms to work. In Bitcoin for example, the reason the system has worked for 7+ years with no major issues is because the miners are financially incentivized to maintain the security of the network and verify transactions. This keeps the whole thing running.
I think there's a similar dynamic going on in Steem -- whales holding Steem power and curating content is essential to the whole system working and financial incentive is imperative in motivating them to do so. The question imo is can we develop good bots, or will the whales ultimately recognize bots are bad for the value of their holdings and change their behavior.
So whale bot votes on an article based on earlier yield, article generates lots of votes and much yield, article writer (could be bot-owner, or written by a bot) notices that, pushes out more articles with same topic... which will attract more whale-bots... circle complete?
Yup
I don't think that curation algorithm for these bots is anything like you describe it.
If I would be whale I would just have a list of two dozen accounts for bot to vote right after 4-5 accounts from the list upvoted particulate post.
🤔 that would be a very basic bot. Some whale curation bots are surely more complex than that.
Yes, definitely there are ways to make it more sophisticated. I was just referring to your words that bots are "identifiyng users with big payout posts in the past" - I definitely have seen cases bots voting for posts without any big past payouts.
I haven't seen any whale curation bots do this. Please point to examples if you have, would be interested to see.
maybe this https://steemit.com/art/@nekromarinist/the-devil-is-in-the-details
By the way, just found a new interesting post about curation bots https://steemit.com/curation/@wingz/beat-the-bots-the-evolution-of-curation
You're full of crap ntomaino! zap You make a persuasive argument ntomaino.
For a minnow or new comers bot indeed a bad for them including myself , due to whales only look to previous member content and didn't update their bot (I think ) to new member contents . Hopefully doing it by manually more better , if this thing keep happening like this steemit seems like won't go more further .
This what I thought .
Yes, bots upvoting content is taking out the genuine nature of steemit. There are other issues also that is going to hurt steemit. When you are talking about money, corruption is going to be involved also.
Bots are an inevitability though in my mind and there's more good that could potentially come out of it than bad.
I liken it to the argument that some have against technology-- that it takes the humanity out of interaction. While maybe that's true to an extent, at the end of the day we're better off for it and its an unstoppable force.