So, what’s the answer to the BullyBot?

in #steemit8 years ago (edited)

As I wrote recently,

"Happening on SteemIt - Beware!!! The BullyBots are coming!"
https://steemit.com/steemit/@davidnx/happening-on-steemit-beware-thebullybots-are-coming

the BullyBot (as I call it) will soon be roaming SteemIt and flagging users who upvote their own comments, thus taking away financial rewards and maybe also lowering reputation score.


(pixabay.com)

If this had been decided by consensus and following discussions with the whole community and the SteemIt team (who could decide on using a different approach to solving the problem), fair enough, but it wasn’t. It’s just a small group taking it upon itself to decide when and how things will be done. No time given to power down first if you don’t like it - no real chance to argue against their decision.


(pixabay.com)

So, what can you do about this?

One remedy is to power down so that you have less than 1000 Steem Power. Be careful, though, the bot can easily be reprogrammed to use a lower number at any time, and this will probably happen if they are sucessfull. It may even be reprogrammed to target voting on your own posts as well.

If you don’t want to do that, there is another remedy, and it goes like this…


(pixabay.com)

You have already seen all the junk that appears on SteemIt. You know, the post which only contains a link to a youtube video, a random meme taken from the web, or just some innocuous comment.
Well, you, too, can also do that - it takes very little effort to magic up several posts and upvote them. The good thing about that is that you are not going anything wrong.

Of course, the content that you might be producing anyway may suffer in its quality, due to the extra time you are taking out, but at least BullyBot won’t get you!
You don’t have to feel guilty about it - why should you be penalized just because you have invested more in Steem Power - it's better to just follow the bandwagon and do what everybody else is doing! Treat SteemIt more like a blog than a publishing platform.

It's as simple as that!

I myself have now started doing this, but before I am accused of doing it solely to game the system, I would like to say that I already have my own website blog where I post links, pictures and other trivial stuff, so I am in effect just replacing that with SteemIt.

(Remember to save a proportion of your Voting Power for people who comment on your posts and other stuff you may come across. But only upvote on things that are worth it.)

Tell me what you think of this post. Am I becoming a bad boy of SteemIt?


(pixabay.com)


The Smallprint (I always try to upvote any reasonable comments (i.e. those with more than a few words) with between 5% and 20% of voting power - this presently equates to about 2 cents to 8 cents depending on my voting strength. Please be patient, it can sometimes take several days before I do my upvotes. If there aren’t enough comments, I will simply upvote myself.)


Coming soon - the big one!
The Homeless Wildcamper - as homelessness when I return to the UK is looking more and more inevitable, you may soon be able to see here on SteemIt how I fare. It will be an epic story including video, pictures and commentary of events and my own feelings as things progress.

Join me on:

SteemIt - https://steemit.com/@davidnx

Twitter - (coming soon)

Facebook - (coming soon)

My webpage - (coming soon)

Sort:  

I like it
I'm generally against flags.
but If I get flagged I'm
MIGHTY TEMPTED
to return the favor.

If everyone who gets flagged.
flaggs in return
not the bot but those who made it.
what do you think will happen?

What I imagine the community can do if they very much don't like what this bot decides to do is simply downvote the bot a lot. Then it will have very little impact.

Very beautiful researchef steemit upvote Article
Highly Appreciated
Good work

well spoken!

and a great teaser to what's coming next...

steem-on!

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