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RE: Boosters -- Why They Are Bad For Steem and Steemit
This is a serious problem that is only going to get worse... Like you, I'm not sure exactly what to do about it yet, but awareness is step one.
The people who operate these bots needs to take responsibility for the issue and do what they can to curtail abuse. If they won't, then those providing the SP should withdraw their delegations...
IDK. You've got me thinking, I will try and find a tangible way to help with this issue in the near future.
I totally agree with you! Minnowbooster is working hard to prevent abuse as much as humanly possible and I would love to hear your input on how to improve there.
We hope that other bots feel the pressure and also work on combating abuse. So if you can, raise the awareness :)
Thanks for responding @reggaemuffin, I appreciate it! It's great that you are aware of these issues and working to make them better.
In the short term, putting you and other upvote bot operators in touch with each other (perhaps through discord or Steemit Chat) could help. Whenever a spammer is found on one bot, the other owners could be alerted to blacklist that person...
Just thinking out loud here - Are you open to something in that vein? I may reach out to the other owners of upvote bots and see if they'd be receptive to the idea. A "Steemit Bot Council" or something :-)
I am definitely up to that! I would even go so far to offer other bot owners api access to our blacklist and give them the option to suggest new users to be added onto it. Should @berniesanders and @fyrstikken be interested, they know where to contact us :)
Awesome! I'll poke around and see if I can help get this ball rolling.
Sounds good, we at @minnowbooster can work with the @steemcleaners to provide a public blacklist for all bot operators to utilise, I give it my approval also.
I'm really glad to hear this. I recently stopped my delegation to minnowbooster because I share some of the same concerns mentioned in this post. I enjoyed the daily SBD rewards, but at what cost? I don't want to think too short-term here. Even if it means I lose out on some nice returns, I'd rather not see any old post being voted up by booster bots when other great content goes unnoticed. Ideally, we're out the curating the best content to the top to promote the value of this website for everyone.
@raggaemuffin Good to see you here providing open dialogue! That means a lot!
Always looking for ways to improve :) Would love to hear your take on the topic!
I do have some thoughts....
But as for improvements..... Seems for anything Steemit wide, any change or improvement I think of..... I then think of how.... "Yep, then they would game it like ___ that or ____ this."
But I have been thinking about this a lot. So I will get with you sometime. Here or maybe on discord if I catch u there sometime.
Thanks
Yep totally agree with you ;)
I feel that this is the smallest of all the issues. Besides, boosters and upvote bots are crucial for the survival of the minnows and present an opportunity for their posts to be seen in the first place. Without them most users would have no chance of getting anything at all from their posts. I do agree though that the bot owners must incoporate a better mechanism to weed out the spammers.
The first and foremost major issue today is that low quality posts made by the same authors feature on the trending pages day after day, and week after week, for months. There seems to be no end to it, and it can stop only if the cartels and auto upvote bot owners who are behind upvoting these posts are confronted and dealt with.
If all the major content sites can do it, why can't Steemit constitute a team of curators who manually highlight the top 100 posts each day, out of all those that are trending so that at least the posts on the real trending page are genuine high quality posts?
Some positive action will mean that the owners and stakeholders of Steemit are indeed serious about it, and not just playing around with a beta for the fun of it.
Also, I think if Steemit as a community drives the upvoting of high quality content as a rule than a personal preference, things will change for the better.
Hey Maxabit,
You make some good points. You're definitely right that a lot of minnows are able to get early support from upvote bots whereas they may otherwise give up, or struggle. I'd argue that some of these users are actually shooting themselves in the foot though - the Curie project, for example, offers HUGE upvotes ($100+ at current rates) to minnows with great content - but people who use upvote services are generally not eligible for this support.
For me, curie was the most important part of my early steem career. If I'd used upvote bots, I would not have ever gotten curated by them.
You mention that you'd like to see the "top 100 posts per day" curated by professionals - Curie basically does that, except it's more like 10 per day, and get them onto the top trending pages for their categories.
Here's an example of a recent curie-supported post: https://steemit.com/music/@dimitrij/seine-concert-in-slovenia-third-tour-belgium-and-france
So - if you see what I mean, users actually do have access to what you are describing - but only if they do not use the upvote bots.
It's not a perfect system - but it may be worth it for you to consider an alternative view. Perhaps upvote bots, while they feel good in the short term, are actually circumventing the kind of quality curation that you hope to see on our platform.
You have stated these points very eloquently and I whole-heartedly concur.