Gaming the System
'Bots Game The System
Everyone knows that.
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Bot's make curation a farce.
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Bots don't read, enjoy or value a post. Bot's process the system for money. Bot's are the only way that one person can 'curate' a post and make lots of money with rep 25 bots. That require a LOT of bots. A fraction of a penny for curation isn't much, but a penny times thousands times forty votes a day adds up to significant cash.
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just last week I saw someone offering up to 30k accounts for a dollar each..
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For sale: 70 mined Steem accounts loaded with 1.59M to 1.79M VESTS (currently equivalent to 358.8 to 403.7 Steem Power) each
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sale steemit accounts per 0.35$
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That's thirty five cents to buy an account. How many accounts does ten dollars buy? A hundred?
How hard is it to obtain a 'bot for each account? Not very hard.
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I made a curation bot for steem
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Bots and the Steemit Ecosystem
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Building Better Bots: Ranking the Top Curators
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Bot's don't curate, they 'process' the steem stream. I consider it to be a form of cheating.
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Steemit has over 105K accounts. Some have 'guesstimated' that 60% or more are 'bots. Is it any wonder that content creation is relatively low? Is it any wonder that 'users' come to steem, don't stay very long, then go?
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So what's the solution?
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I'll have my machine get with your machine.
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What need of people then? Why not just write a short post , it doesn't have to be a very good one
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then have thirty thousand of your bots upvote it?
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I dunno about other writers but I don't particularly care to write for robots. That's not writing that's wanking. Writing for (your own) robots might explain why a one sentence (REALLY STUPID) post get's a thousand votes. It's easy if you have a thousand thirty five cent accounts. Each of which vote forty times a day.
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It would seem to me that the solution is obvious.
CAPTCHA
It would seem to me that if CAPTCHA were required for every vote......
Require that every time a vote is cast the voter must first solve a CAPTCHA. That would prevent 'bots from voting
One Wonders Why That isn't happening?
Full Disclosure
I bought into CrowdSourceWhale when it first came out.
In fact I was the first 'investor'.
I thought about it a while.
Observed how it worked
Then I wrote this post.
I agree completely about bots and how they also discourage actual users. On a side note, I used to put up more content, but because my own content can't be (that I know of) organized yet in anyway if someone visits my blog page.. well.. I don't want to post from my phone since it may be lower quality and I don't want to have low quality posts clustering my blog lol. If and when there is a good way to organize our own blog spot, then people like me will create a lot more and not worry about making every blog great. Just blog..no pressure.
So true Alben. I'm on holiday, away from my PC for a week. I have heaps of ideas but won't post from my phone for the same reason.
I am getting some time lapse footage of the tide coming in, with a steemit logo in frame, right now.
Just waiting for the tide to go back out so I can recover my camera and look at the stills. Again, I won't be able to stitch the shots into a video or post until I'm back at my PC.
CAPTCHA is a good idea. Still, if 60% of the accounts are bots, that means there's over 40,000 real people here to interact with. Interacting is the key. I just make fun of bots or ignore them.
I can assure you, reading comments in my posts, they're not coming from bots. These are real people, just as the curating teams are real people really reading your posts. Curating is bringing people together with common interests who will also read your posts.
If you notice the chart
there aren't very many active users.
Perhaps 4%?
(about four thousand actual human writers?)
What is everyone else doing?
Are they all 'bots?
I've had some bots comment in my posts.
The twitter-bot was very helpful and actually linked in the whole message/image.
I vote like a bot. I upvote anything that 30 min old and has votes. Because it's profitable and voting on things I like is not.
Curation is really bad at steem.
We need:
Be able to vote on any content at any time.
Choose what we want to vote on.
Get rewarded for activity and loyalty. I.e. If we vote every day etc.
We need people to vote a lot but let them chose what they want to reward instead of creating game theory game. That's why bots win today.
I agree a lot but right you you can choose to upvote with only 1% reward if you want to support the content without rewarding it with $. I may misunderstand what you mean there.
I am incentivized to never vote on content that is older than 1h and vote on anything that is 30min old.
U have a 15min window that is really profitable....
It's really silly
If anything happens when you are asleep...you don't get to play.
I agree...really silly.
Agreed. I don't like time constraints in a leisure pursuit. Part of the allure of Steem is having fun. We SHOULD be able to vote on any content at any time.(I agree on your other two points as well)
ggg
Good post, Really the only problem with this being implemented is minnows and dolphins dependency on whales. If this was implemented we would probably start seeing a lot less votes from whales on all post. Then a lot of us would be missing out on some of the higher rewards that we are receiving now.
So true, bots are mainly used to siphon off steem that would normally be given to a human user. They had the computer written articles scam too. It discourages people from staying, and you can see it in the horrible retention.
Not that there aren't helpful bots.
Good thoughts but...
I have to ask how can a captcha be applied? Bots don't interact with the site, but rather the blockchain. I don't think captcha is feasible.
No clue on the technical details.
It might not work.
But then it might. I suspect that it could be made to work or something very similar if ......
ah yes...the IF
the eight hundred pound gorrilla in the room.
"where does an eight hundred pound gorrilla sit?
Any where he wants to.
How is the Steemit Programmed?
However the whales want it to be.
....just saying..