Is Bot Activity Harmful To An Economy Such As Steemit?
Many Steemit newcomers are being highly concerned about bot activity. And who wouldn't be really. We like to believe that we have an active role in society. We are sentient beings darn it and our judgment matters!
Except when it doesn't. Think about it. Whatever makes you, you is nothing but a conglomerate of beliefs that have been accumulated through time. Whether you like it or not, you have been programmed to act a certain way that falls under the constituents of your family, education and in a greater extent culture.
Whenever you upvote something you are mostly reinforcing your own views about something. You are actively rewarding your own capital. Similarly, a bot set up by a user has a similar approach. Your aim is to increase your intellectual and social capital and the bot aims to increase the user's financial capital. The financial capital on it's turn, if utilized correctly, has the potential to increase the intellectual and social capital of the user. Neither is unethical or immoral. It is what it is.
A bot cannot replace a real user. Mass adaptation of bots will render any platform mechanical and useless. People will start seeing no value and therefore abandon such an economic model. A free-market dynamic will ensure a balance between bot vs user generated activity.
We like to wish that we control our environment and that somehow we live in a genuine culture that rewards individuality and uniqueness. The matter of fact is that most people are on a cultural autopilot. What they consider unique about themselves is as unique as an orange on an orange tree. There is some molecular variation but for the most part is all the same recycled patterns.
Don't be bothered about bot activity. Times are changing. This phenomenon will increase as technology progresses. Instead try to work your strategy and adopt on this environment rather than trying to revolt against it. If anything Steemit provides the unique opportunity for us to test what is inevitably coming in the near future. Remember, much like Darwin himself has pointed out: the one who survives is neither the smartest nor the strongest but the one who is most adaptable to change.
Can humans do a better job then the bots?!
I think it's all about balance. Some bots do really useful work, like cheetah, but the amount of bots should always be a small percentage of the real users.
Some bots I really don't see the value of. There's one that randomly upvotes hundreds of new posts with $0.01. What is the use of that?
The amount is always calculated from the free voluntary interactions. When a bot has no real value the market will eradicate it.
There is a difference in the way people and bots might "view" value. A bot is an automated algorithm that requires very little resources to run while a person that is active on the platform manually tends to value their own time more. On top of this, you can't scale your own time as it's a limited resource, but you can scale bots pretty much indefinitely as you could just run more and more instances (I'm mainly talking about spambots). This means that even if an automated account makes pennies a day while creating a huge amount of spam, it might still offer a positive ROI to the person running it while a real person might be unhappy with such a low return for their time spent on the platform. This difference creates different incentives for people and bots, so a desirable balance might be harder to achieve and it seems quite unlikely to me that the free market could eradicate this type of automation. But I wholeheartedly agree that this is by no means the end of the world, it's just a simple fact of life here on steemit.
This can also be good since there can be two separate kinds of economies within steemit. Also. another bot that also follows bots can downvote as easy.
True. I'm surely not saying it couldn't work out ok and that there's nothing the community could do about it. But powering up a downvoting bot to stop an undesirable practice doesn't really sound like the market correcting things, but people correcting things.
Ahh hah. Caught you !!!!! LOL. You do believe in the free market (as a better political system than many alternatives)
STEEM On !!
I think that botting is to some extent hateful, because it stimulates people on posting anything at all, knowing that they will make a profit from it. Honestly if you ask me bota and self upvote should be disabled, but that is how it is, so no reasson to fuss and stress over it. Hopefully the market expands and prices jump so all can enjoy.
Cheers and much love and support from me <3
I love your quality contents friend ^^
@vangelov
You can't disable bots. You can just make it a bit more difficult for the people creating them. Facebook, Instagram and other big social media websites might be at war with bots, but they remain full of automated fake accounts. Additionally, if you disabled selfvoting, you would just stimulate people to have more than one accounts so they have a way to "spend" their voting power on themselves if they wanted to. It will make it much less common, but it couldn't really eradicate it altogether.
It's a bit of a tricky situation, a lot of newbies are creating quality content just to make a few cents on those posts and hardly receive any votes. Many established heavy weight user only vote on their own or other whales, so many minnows have no alternative but to use bots.
indeed.
So, how do we get heavy weight users to discover and vote on new content within the platform instead of relying on secondary bots?
increase curation rewards
So, should Steemit incentive whales in some way to upvote Minnow's content? Content that may not yield as many organic rewards as just voting on another whale?
Reduced voting power costs, maybe? So, they'd be less afraid of 'wasting' votes?
Maybe a New Member page that makes it easier to curate newbie's content?
Or we expect minnows that want to be whales to make the investment needed to get there. No free lunches. No instant gratification. If you don't want to or can't bring a bunch of money to the platform to move toward whale status, then expect you will need to invest a lot of your time to get the same outcome.
I don't like the bots, but what can I do about it?
Yup, definitely. I've read articles pro and anti bots. Voting bots in particular. But recently, there was an article that broke down the possibility of gains and losses from using the voting bots. In the end, even with the likely profit loss from using voting bots, he pointed out what is called the tip jar effect such that it can be an advertisement for the author. With the flood of users to this platform, it gets harder and harder to be noticed. So it becomes clearer to noob like me that though the initial purpose of a voting bot is to increase payout, many users found another use for it as a marketing tool. And the fact that many are flourishing through its use, it's likely very effective. In any environment, without learning to adapt, the system will likely swallow you.
indeed
I think for a minnow or a newbie like me and many of us have to work very hard to get a little exposure that we wanted here. On steemit the major power rests in the hands of WHALES and they mostly use it for their own benefit because in the end 'one is for himself'. So if you really wanna work your ass off to get a little or no exposure then, you need be too patient about it.
These bots can really help us to get much exposure we needed at a very less cost. @discordia is really good.
I am not actually motivating these bots, but they are necessary evil for steemit platform. Without them, many will perish.
A big thumbs up for your work though @kyriacos
well said. thanx man.
Should there be a whale tax to counter-act whales using their power for only their own interests? Some system in place to share the gains of the system more equitably?
Large bot-adoption would probably just be a race to the bottom for everyone on the platform. While at the same time stifling the potential for growth as new users are less likely to stay on the platform when the majority of early interactions they get are from bots.
Any effort to surface more of the human-to-human interactions that do happen in channels and chatrooms such as steem.chat or discord to new users (as a part of the steemit platform) and ensure that they can engage with people earlier, would help a lot I think.
Be aware of Networks (yes, even using bots as a one's Network) using fraudulent tactics of high-value flagging in combination with powerful self-upvoting in a scheme to confiscate potential rewards in the rewards pool curated by their (and it's Networks') own actions.
Personally I was hoping this was a very human site where the actions of one (be it for or against) would stand on a 1:1 ratio. Yet it clearly is not, it is more of a Financial Oligarchy. And those who are clever enough to see it, have the finances to back it and the technical know-how to achieve it, are the ones most definitely taking advantage of it while they can (PARTICULARLY with the use of bots).
I strongly encourage any newcomer, or those thinking to invest, to not only read the "White Papers" yet also to consider reading ⚠ ☢ ☣ ☠ Steemit Safety Meeting: Objective Two; "Abuse", The Current Drop of Cryptocurrencies Value, and the Burning Question If One Should Invest? ☠ ☣ ☢ ⚠ before continuing on this website OR investing one penny into it....
Quality of Content < Strength of One's Own Network
It did not take me long to realise bots and abuse here are out of control.
Quality of Content doesn't even really matter any more. Someone can post the absolute spam of all spam, and if they have a sufficient Network in place (of either loyal & malicious humans, bots, or both) designed to flag content outside it's own Network while upvoting only the Network Master's posts (while the Master only uses high-value self-upvotes on itself), said spam becomes extremely profitable to the one running such a Network (and the rewards pool is drained, an effective confiscation of funds for the benefit of the already "wealthy" while a detriment to the struggling "poor")....
It's not difficult to connect the dots to financial fraud when one realizes the main purpose behind these types of malicious Networks' posts is to get newcomers to invest real fiat currency into their (our) system. And auto-flag and auto-upvote bots are the key core to such a malicious system, of thee most importance to the Master of such a Network.
"Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders." ~ Page 17 of the "White Papers".
Think about this for a minute before continuing to read: A bot can be set up to flag (or upvote) automatically without even knowing/understanding the quality of the content it's giving value to or taking away from. A bot can be financed to have much power, power used to blindly cast "judgement" on the creations of others; a power - used towards Red Fish and Minnows - that can make an account or break an account.
Negative-voting.... thee 'ol double-edged sword... the same power that gives a thousand Red Fish the ability to "nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders" is the same power that gives collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders the ability to nullify the voting power of thousands of Red Fish.
In other words, it takes the efforts of thousands of little accounts to nullify the voting abuse of one large account while it only takes the actions of one large account to nullify the stabilizing efforts of thousands of little accounts....
AND YES, EVEN IF IT IS A BOT ACCOUNT; IF IT IS FINANCED WELL ENOUGH, ONE ACCOUNT CAN EFFECTIVELY "DESTROY" A THOUSAND RED FISH ACCOUNTS FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN THE WILL OF IT'S MASTER.
Bot activity is the future. It is even the present. I used to play chess as a child, when I realized the computers are better than any human player, I stopped playing. Years later I started playing again. Not sure why... times are strange