RE: Punishing Rabid Self-Upvoting of Comments
I tried self-voting a few of my comments and realized it really doesn't make sense if I want to contribute to the community in a more substantial and social way.
It really hit home earlier today when I had what I thought was a nice and mutually beneficial interaction with another user. I upvoted a few of her posts that I liked, then (after suggesting she read a story I had just posted) she left a comment on my story saying how much she liked it, but she didn't upvote it. She did however upvote her own comment and, from the looks of it, upvoted it with two more bots. I literally put almost 10 hours work into my story over a number of days. Is that a bot then or just discourteous behavior? I took what steps I could, but still, it was a disappointment. Check the link, as of right now it is still there, so you can see what I mean. (While you are at it, maybe read the story, you might just like it :)!)
I have hated botters since my WoW days like the plague and won't follow suit now that I better understand what is going on and how it can be abused. The World of Warcraft equivalent would be a battelground bot riding everyone else's coattails who are actually contributing to the match. It doesn't make sense to me to incentivize voting on your own comments if that means reducing or even completely neglecting rewards for the people who actually create the content being commented on. Or am I missing something?
There are good bots and bad bots -- the difference is the behavior they display.
The behavior displayed by the user (and her friends, sock-puppets or bots) was discourteous and should be discouraged.
Thanks for the response, the learning curve here is really something else.
One more question: Do the bots automatically follow you if you upvote particular posts or comments, or what? I have 95 followers and only 30 upvotes on all of my content posts put together (not including comments). I guess that is coming from my comments in other threads with people liking my comments, but it seems weird. I try and visit everyone I follow and check out their content and upvote things I like, which I have (perhaps mistakenly) assumed is normal behavior. Just how complex are these bots? Are they outfitted with autochat functions for example? Are there plagiarism bots that post stuff from around the internet, or does that still require people at the wheel? Just trying to connect the dots and explain how the readership of real people here functions, what kind of throughput etc one can expect. I would also be thankful for tips on identifying bots.
The platform incentivizes you to vote yourself and not other people. It should be the other way around or it is no longer a social platform.