You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Is Bot Activity Harmful To An Economy Such As Steemit?
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 !!