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RE: Response to @dantheman "notice-to-bot-spammers"
In my view, it's the responsibility of the platform to maximize user enjoyment instead of maximizing software experimentation in the field of bots. If the platform can achieve that through incentives, reputation systems, etc, etc, I'm ok for it.
Software enthusiasts will just have to work that much harder so that they make software which manages to attain positive reputation instead of being outright annoying. From one perspective, it's a new challenge and those who manage to create bots that are useful, instead of annoying (or worse yet, damaging), will survive.
It's a combination of the two. Bots which can someday produce content are producing value if the content helps the Steemit community in some way. The problem is the current breed of bots are quite dumb and don't add much value most of the time but this could change so I'm not anti-bot or anti-swarm if it reduces the amount of attention a human being has to pay to details for instance. But it's not going to currently replace a human being, it's only a time saver or attention saver.
@dana-edwards Thanks for summarizing in a paragraph something that took me 4 hours to write :) Pretty much the entire point of the STEEMBOTS thread was about this and how to draw the current builders into doing something far more productive.
@alexgr I get what you are saying. I think @casandrarose was spot on though when she said "Lol bored players having bot wars".
The purpose of this post was to show that by punishing users you are maximizing software experimentation in the field of bots. You need a rules tweak to fix that. Several are possible, but I called out the ones I felt had the most potential for impact on total user experience.
Not every bot needs to be a chatter bot. In fact my opinion is that a chatter bot at most should be an answering machine here. Hi @williambanks isn't here right now, but I'll email him this message.
Yet there are some insights to be drawn, for example a social similarity bot could say "If you like William Banks posts you should check out @dana-edwards , @casandrarose @melissaschwartz and @stellabelle these are people he likes as well"
Obviously you wouldn't want something like that stalking you in every post especially a ton of me too bots. Hence a code of conduct.
However there are also a ton of AI use cases where no chatter is directly needed. Imagine a system like cheetah but distributed to every user. You see a posting, there is some analysis done and if you are the first to detect cheating, the bot makes an autopost on your behalf similar to cheetah and the upvote love is yours to keep.
It would still be you posting this. Because you wouldn't be participating if you didn't feel the effort was important. This just automates the tedious and repetitive tasks such as googling an image or parsing a message.
The thing with a code of conduct is that it is not as rigid as rules. And even when there are rules, someone may be breaking them if the penalty is not high.
Regarding bots like cheetah, yeah, this type of automation is nice to have - but I guess the level of implementation is rather fluid. It could be embedded in the page, be displayed by a bot in the comments, or run locally by a user.
Btw, I'm seeing some bypasses for original content detection with slightly broken english. Perhaps someone is using google translate from english => other language => english to reorder the text, or some other rewording technique. This would need a more evolved type of cheetah to detect the similarities...
@alexgr Yeah thank you for your comments on my next week's blog posting :) I actually have a much better solution in mind based on contextual fingerprinting algorithms.
Basically a machine translates like a machine. Ergo you can spot machine translations when they occur and each translator has a way of screwing things up that is absolutely unique to them. For example, try putting "I would like a hotdog please." Into google translate, then translate to spanish and watch the hilarity ensure. (especially if you show it to someone who actually speaks spanish)
Now machine translation itself isn't a bad thing. I couldn't survive one day in a foreign country (some parts of the USA too) without tools such as google translate .
It does mean you need to look at the conceptual flow through the document, see if anyone has said anything which is conceptually and structurally the same. Identify those documents, and run them through various machine translators to see if you get a strong match.
This is called strong attribution via contextual analysis and knowledge extraction
There isn't a way to cheat this without actually rewriting the entire document yourself first and at that point it's pretty much the same as a term paper.
But umm that's next week's blog, so I hope you'll stop back by and comment on this then.
Looking forward to it :)