Image from Terminator film franchise

The first bots incoming to Steemit were the upvote bots. They monitor all the published articles and decide which to vote according to diverse criteria: length, author reputation, tags, other upvotes received... Some of them focus at getting the maximum curation rewards, some at helping the newbies, some at finding good content.

-Author reputation: Setting a minimum too high discriminate the newbies. Setting a minimum too low and the bot could be exploited by multi-accounts. 45-50 seems to be the worst reputation range: neither the newbie-helper nor the quailty-focused upvotes you.

• Bots looking for curation: This bots only reward users with a steady income from older posts, increasing the inequality between the top authors and the rest. Furthermore, they create chain reactions: the upvote of a bot increases the post reward, attracting other curation bots for upvoting too.

Then the pay to get upvote/resteem bots started to appear. I totally agree with one of the statements made by @ejemai on his article "Bots voting" the new Steemit culture...

Writers who really put in their grind to get the stories out to the world will be replaced with Bot made writers who may accidentally become rich.

And the last novelty on the Steemit bot market? @iamgrootbot

A bot that just sends the same comment again and again:

I am Groot! :D

And what was the answer of the community? Flaggin him? Not at all! He is reputation level 37 right now. @rossenpavlov asked for flagging it, but "Groot" answered that it is not spam because it sends only one comment per user and asked for cunter-attack flagging the @rossenpavlov article

Image from http://steemd.com

Useful bots

@cheetah is the key to plagiarims fight at Steemit. It helps at finding copy-pasted content adn leave a comment to alert users and @steemcleaners It does not flag however, only warns. Is is not perfect, so everybody should double check the post and thesource before downvoting.

@tippy is a bot by @klye (witness, currently at rank 8) I guess the objective is to integrate it with another social networks. Many cryptocoins subreddit already have tip bots, for example Dogecoin

@blueorgy (witness, currently at rank 62) also has developed several bots:

A bot that reply with an automated comment to any mention

@steemprice which replies with price of BTC, STEEM and BTC/STEEM value when anyone mentions him

@helpbot which is bulding a data base of frequently-asked questions

@helpbot who are you?

Did you know about any additional bot who thinks it is useful for the community? Let me know in the comments!

My opinion about bots

Bots need some restrictions. The precedent of @iamgrootbot can bring more and more comment bots to the platform. It is not a just a matter of who likes them and who dislike them. They are increasing the bandwidth and storage use for witnesses and have a potential for making DDOS attacks. Flagging only hides their comments, it does not forbid them for continue posting.

My suggestion

A dynamic system based on reputation that limits the submit of articles and comments. When a limit of comments is reached in a certain period of time, a cooling time that can be dismissed by completing a captcha would be triggered. The higher the reputation the less restrictive is that limit. Replies to mentions are not affected by that rule.

Image from Google reCAPTCHA

What is your opinion about that topic? Let me know in the comments!