The Dehumanizing Factor of Voting Bots
Steemit is supposed to be a social media platform where real people interact and vote for content. Voting Bots act much like investment schemes were close circles share the rewards. The human factor goes kaput. This is the harsh truth any new member will soon come to understand.
This, I believe, is the single most important factor why a new member might be wary of joining or even continue being in the platform after a while. Seeing that a post has been viewed 8-10 times but has 120 votes is rather ridiculous. Big investors also note this and might be hesitant to join. It's just not sustainable and looks very much like a scam.
I believe the big guns of the platform know this very well but do not say anything since they are all enjoying most of the rewards. Money talks. A selected few have made a small fortune over the past year contributing more or less the same amount value. If Steemit is to move forward to the mainstream, it needs to abolish the bot system all together.
i don't deny that I also used steemvoter over the past couple of months but I decided to stop using it today for this reason. I believe those who really care about the platform should do the same. Traditional social media reduce users into products being used. We are not doing anything different when voting bots vote selected accounts. Content stops having value.
We owe to rise above the current paradigm if social media users from other platforms are to adopt Steemit as an alternative. Humans are Steemit's more valuable commodity. Let's treat it as such.
This is also why I stopped using a voting bot - even though my curation rewards went up a lot, it wasn't worth it for me from the human standpoint.
yeap, somehow it just doesn't cut it.
I very briefly dallied with steemvoter but it didn't sit right with me that I was just automatically voting and not reading, so quit it. It's hard to keep up with my feed when we are busy but so be it. I would much prefer a manual read and vote over anything else
In fact like you said... money talks. :-)
Nobody finally care when the cash for him is good - you see it daily.
The fact that we witness this daily should make us more vigilant about improving the current state of things. We do have the opportunity to do this. We just need a little courage. We need to realize that in the long-term the rewards will be much greater.
The mindset that cryptos are just short term economic schemes hurts everyone at the end of the day.
How do voting bots even work? Follow an assortment of whales and vote everything they vote on too? To get curation rewards? I've had it too, many votes and very few views. Also seemingly randomized gang voting on one post i make, then almost nothing on others that are not that different (which could be explained by just randomness and posting time maybe). So to use a bot to vote for me, I'd think I might support the wrong guys without even knowing. I just upvote what i really like and since we don't have endless voting power per day it's not gonna be too many votes as to not start hurting people with a quasi negative vote (if i understood the concept correctly)
Yeap, pretty much it goes exactly like you described.
Money talks ... and the system is designed around this concept: voting time, bots, whales and collusion of a certain group, creates the bandwagon effect. Write good articles but it's a game, a lottery!
This problem has existed since the beginning. Those who have denounced the situation have been flagged
indeed. sad.
That's why I look at VIVA. I wrote a few articles on the subject.
Well that's not true in all cases, my goal with my curation trail has been to distribute the vote followings as wide as possible with newcomers and just-starting-out authors in mind. I've been curating with a trail for over half a year now and focusing on this and its not like people have flagged me because of it.
Now you have said what I have been feeling for days here as a new comer. It is sad to work so hard for a post only for it to get no vote just because you don't belong. Then you see a post almost not as much in value getting 300 votes in 4 views. It is sure way to reduce the quality of content here since there is no pay for performance. You are a good man. History will be kind with you. Followed
I think you will find that bot behavior has been changing as the platform grows. I've seen new accounts getting very few views and very few votes. Less people are using bots to vote wide scale across the platform.
People do express anxiety over it occasionally, but you know, some people are just anxious people. Others just brush it off and don't even consider it an issue.
I use bots. I pretty much exclusively use them to vote for friends and authors I read. I much prefer to use them than manually curate. I'm kinda busy! I'm not voting for the curation alone even. I'm voting for the author or friends mutual benefit. Without curation, I would still vote for the same people. This way gives me some small capital gain in my investment in the platform. If I wanted just content, I have a host of other platforms to go to. I'm here for the content and the money. I have more reasons to be here than on other platforms. So I guess I see the whole 'money corrupts' thing as irrelevant. Sinking time into reading content on a platform is a time consuming process. Time is the most precious commodity. Getting paid for that time helps to justify the time spent.
perfectly understood.
What are your thoughts on manual voting from a curator and their trails?
I share your thoughts that money talks and I've seen way too many posts that have a high reward because of some big trails and then you look at the interactivity of the post or viewcount or the viewcount of the video and its many times lower than a small % of the SD it is being rewarded.
The worst is when this happens from curators or bots that don't even curate on other content or try and distribute the votes on a wide variety of authors. Greed is a big factor in it.
We are all greedy. Greed runs the world no doubt. The point here is the mentality I think. The old guns of crypto that pretty much are the whales, still have the short-term investment mentality. I agree you can't really convince them otherwise, but they have to realize that things are changing in the crypto-sphere.
There is a massive opportunity for Steemit to become greater than facebook. If they start treating curation as a human act the rewards will be much greater int he future. There is a huge wave of newcomers and they need to experience this human-to-human reward rather than a random faceless robot. They need to see it as an investment, not a pump and dump.
Part of the reason people are fed up with Facebook is because they are not treated as individuals. We have the opportunity to do this here and still remain greedy.
I think its gotten a lot better now during the experiment, I don't think it would hurt to start delegating more inactive SP to new curators and fresh minds that join the platform. Not having the same curators all the time would do it good I think.
I agree. The entire crypto pump helped a lot as well. We need to ride this wave of change wisely.
Agree 100%. Technically not so easy to ban bots though. I never used a bot, don't like the blind auto votes, although some of them give me some rewards on all my posts. But still, I would not mind when the stop auto voting. The big rewarded posts generally have also a much larger vote count than view count. Bots in action, but with some of the big SP holders behind I suppose.
I kind find the vote trails ok, this can be seen as an account giving some other account its SP to vote with. The loco of the train shall be manual curator though and preferable also read and comment.
Without the human factor it just becomes a game of investment where the high rollers dictate pretty much everything.
I agree and was in many discussion on no-bit versus other saying why they are good. cheetah and twitterbot are good. when using bots in a good way, eg filtering posts for manual curation, or even auto vote but later reading an unvoting when required...all good...I know accountholder who autovote but have no maximising revenue in mind, but do it to reward authors they really like and do not want to miss giving their rewards every post. also when bots are not there, the problem is still not solved completely. I think many of the larger SP holder vote randomly, or go in serie through the new channel without reading the posts. so yes, I'm in general against any bad use of bots, and if that means remove all bots, then lets do that....but technical this is very difficult, since bots can kind of behave like humans. now they may vote every couple of minutes, but when the system start looking at behaviours, bots can be made more like human voters...
So I think we need to fight for change of culture, we need to find ways to become more a community with most of the users have respect for eachother. In the end we can fight for things that are technically not possible, or very difficult, therefore will not be attended to in coming year(s) because of other priorities; Better is to work on the culture change we need to have.
The delay on voting should be much greater if you ask me. At least two minutes. This will also give the opportunity to curators to vote for comments or write themselves one.
We have 20 second delay. Even when delay is set to 5 minutes. Then bots can vote each 5th minute. Not an issue to configure a bot like that. You will remove the 1% and 0,1% bot voters, but many of the bot voters are not adotping such strategy.
Bots should be banned in my opinion. The limitation could come as a prerequisite for someone to post a meaningful comment in order for the vote to count. No comment, no voting reward. This will also increase engagement.
Good suggestion, but also difficult to keep in hand. A bot can create a response message/comment. When they do this with std message and when detected that somehow is blocked, then bots become smarter and have a DB full of comments of which they are picking randomly.
The only way to stop bots is to ID every user! And have a police force being able to chk up their setup at whatever place they run their operations from.
I'm not an engineer, but this is my logic!
Maybe a smart contract within Steemit can help the situation. I hope @dantheman can offer some suggestions?
This is why I don't bot vote. I only give warm human votes.
For some reason this image came to my mind when you said "warm human votes"
Wow, how did you get my picture?
Don't tell me you are original creator of this meme?!
No I meant a picture of me ;)
It's one of the many reasons people should have a great deal of respect for you.
Aww thanks! And I respect you for spreading the word of science.