RE: Bots upvoting posts? An investigation
Some bots are worthless, but dolphins and whales can give a trusted poster an instant upvote if they trust the quality of their work. Bots should be discussed without simply taking one side. I see both having them as beneficial (like @wang helps new users a lot and also promotes some great content and users), but if you have to scroll through too many bots it hurts the experience of commenting. So a solution should be proposed and voted on, as the developers take the happiness of all users seriously. If new users are not enjoying their experience they will leave, and without new users, the value of steem will not increase as the pool of great content will be limited. Everyone helping each other out here should be the norm and not a rarity. Reaching out to those frustrated by not having anyone see their content they spent time carefully crafting should be encouraged. It is really disheartening to see a meme make more money than a heartfelt post you spent a day on. Limiting the amount of posts to four with 100% author credit should reduce the number of throwaway content you see often on facebook and redditt. It has its place, but if anyone can make the content you make, it's probably not adding much value. So hopefully everyone can continue having conversations that debate pros and cons and help form a hypothesis that could be implemented in the next fork.
Definitely. I'm not at all saying bots should be banned, and that's a debate that's worth having. I touched upon this issue here - https://steemit.com/steemit/@liberosist/steemservices-cleaning-up-steemit-in-a-big-way
But these upvoting bots are random posting bots are just malicious and dangerous and must be stopped. I have tried starting a discussion a couple of times now, but of course it has to be a more influential steemer for the matter to be taken seriously.
True, and I'm sure there are many people posting about this even if you are not receiving a large audience. The more people that talk about it, the more likely influential people are to see it and bring it to attention. Doesn't matter if it is a minnow or a whale who makes a great suggestion to help lots of people. I would like the bots that do not add any value or proof they have even read the article or added a thoughtful comment to be removed. And their voting power must be limited to almost next to nothing with all the upvoting done quickly. It's a shame that they want to add spam, when a well thought out comment could make them 100's or even 1000's of dollars. Reputation is everything and if you are annoying people notice and may make sure your content receives almost no reward