Are Bots The Problem Or Are People The Problem?
This is a question that has been postulated several times since the beginning of Steemit.
There are 2 sides to the Bot equation:
1. Do we hate bots because they contribute nothing and take everything?
2. Do we hate bots because we are jealous of what they are able to accomplish?
Number 2 is the sticky one... That one is the one I fall under, well sort of. I struggle to consistently make anything on most of my posts and apart from Project Curie, I would probably rarely crack the $1 threshold. This is not meant to be a complaint because I am thankful for every dime that is earned. It is meant as a show of sympathy and empathy for a lot of the users on the site as I am sure they can relate. However, this is not where the jealously should be placed. Bots are not causing the wealth disparity and they are not inherently bad for the platform.
Behind every Bot, there is a programmer, a person, a living breathing organism made up of organic matter. That person decides what a Bot will do. There seems to be a misunderstanding between what exactly is a bot and what is simply a person taking advantage of the system.
A bot, as mentioned above is an extension of it's programmer. Each Bot costs money to make and it costs money to operate. Most of the Bots on the site are limited to voting and basic replies. Most probably aren't even making money for their creators. There are no bots out there that are creating their own content and publishing it under a pen name collecting thousands of dollars per post. That technology doesn't currently exist and that entire process is something with an entirely different name...
People gaming the system.
People are taking advantage of the current rewards system. They are doing so by buying other's work and presenting it as their own. An example would be spending $100 to buy posts that the buyer deems as potential money makers and then he sends these posts out from different accounts, hoping one or more of them hit big and earn hundreds or thousands of dollars. As long as this process remains profitable, they will continue to do it. They are not breaking any rules, technically. Are we mad that they are gaming the system or are we mad that we hadn't thought of it first? Or maybe we are mad they we don't have the resources to implement such a scheme?
Either way... Bots are not the problem. What most people are calling Bots are not even Bots at all.
We don't have a Bot problem... we have a people problem. The current witch hunt going on where all Bots are considered evil and that they are the reason why we are not making enough money needs to end. Our efforts should be focused where the real problems are...
Fixing the payment system.
As of right now we are all fighting to gain share of an ever shrinking pie... and it's shrinking by design. In order to get things to change and to alter the way people are gaming the system, we might have to tinker with the way things are currently set up...
I don't currently have the answer as to how to fix it... but unless we are experiencing exponential growth at all times it is going to be an ever shrinking pie... How can we fix this? Can it be fixed? Right now Steemit has first mover advantage when it comes to this site's technology, but we need to do it right otherwise we will be what Blackberry was to Apple in regards to the smart phone...
Let the debate begin!
Follow: @jrcornel
Bots are the problem. They totally distort trending page and also mess up the reward system. Whales hogging the curation rewards is big enough problem.
Bots should not get any curation or authoring rewards.
You think so? Bots also drum up activity that otherwise would not exist without them... meaning they are helping create a larger pie...
Really great topic, I asked the question to myself today, because I saw that there is a new voting bot for everyone at: https://steemvoter.com/ I didn´t tried it so far. What do you think about such voting bots?
Well.. if nothing else they drum up activity :)
Like I mentioned in the post... I don't think they are good or bad really... most of them don't make money for their creators... they just are part of life...
This looks very cool, will have to look into it. I've been toying with the notion of figuring out how to code a simple bot to vote on posts in my feed... since people I follow generally put out what I consider to be high quality content and most of the time I vote for it anyway, a bot would save me a bit of manual work and optimize curation rewards. Then I could still handpick a couple posts to read and comment on to make best use of my limited time. But if this site could be configured to do that using some easily set rules, then wow, it would be the best thing ever!
My main issue with bots is that using them requires specialized technical knowledge that only a small subset of users have, so there are questions of whether or not it's really fair to use a bot (I would argue it is, as the bot creator has to put an amount of effort into creating the bot that justifies the competitive advantage thus gained, if any). But if the playing field can be leveled by making bots accessible to the masses so that anyone can have one, I'm all for that!
@jrcornel definitely people! @williambanks wrote a great post about this topic.
@dantheman just put out a post today...https://steemit.com/steemit/@dantheman/boost-steem-value-by-backing-steem-dollar
that may seriously help answer my questions at the very end... something has to be done about the declining price of Steem!
Yes! I have read a couple posts about this topic lately... they inspired me to get my thoughts out there as well :)
https://steemit.com/ai/@williambanks/the-uncanny-valley-why-oh-why-do-you-think-it-s-ai
There are no bots out there that are creating their own content - sadly there is some , do you read often articles here ? Ohh you canot all this post disapiert magikal because of flaging !
They are not Bots... they are likely people plagiarizing or translating from another language... bots cannot think for themselves... yet
Hmm i dont like to make you sad but this is not true- bot did awredy hole blog here :) All articles was made by AI generate from giving him a key words . So they are unique not plagiarizing if you dont bulive me chek stellabele acount she got post about this but is hiden buy flaging .
The posts were created by keywords fed to them by the creator... there was no thinking for itself. It was basically an author gathering work from others funneling into a machine and the information that was spit out was used as posts...
Not by the creator but by user :) And this posts was crazy upvoted (4 numbers )
Bots are the problem. For instance, I have been flagged by the steemit bot because they found my blog. I usually repost my blog to steemit. Of course, this is somehow seen as plagarism, even though all the content comes from me. This is simply ludacris. I get what it is going for, but it is still whack.
You can go to the "steemit-abuse classic" channel in the chat room and they can go about getting the flag removed for you... on some of the bots they actually say in their reply to you what to do if the flagging is not appropriate...