Bot Makers Have Been Saved!

I have been hesitating on creating an automated upvote/downvote bot because of all of the unknowns for a while now. There were the questions of:

• For upvote "whitelists," how would you know the person will always post quality content? They could use a bait and switch to make it look like you are upvoting something potentially sinister or low-quality.

• For downvote bots, how do you know that person will not change their style / message in the future? Maybe their shit-posts are only temporary and your future downvotes of their content may be in error.

Additionally I was worried that creating too simple of a bot could have negative effects on the Steemit platform. So much so that I created a honeypot post and reacted to the bot upvoting that occured.

But with reputation...

It is so much easier to create these bots now. Individuals with a high reputation will likely do whatever they can to keep it or grow it so you can make safer assumptions on who to add to your upvote "whitelist." You still will need to be careful with downvote bots, but this is a great step in the right direction.

Coming soon

Now I am excited to jump on the bot bandwagon and will soon release my own. But even with the addition of the reputation system though, I will still be manually checking the bot operations daily to verify it is performing as intended.