RE: Steemit developer curation experiments, brace yourselfs, major changes are coming
I've been on this platform since the end of May, during the truly experimental phase, where all payments were held back till July 4th because they were still tweaking, so we didn't even know if we would get anything for all our efforts.
There were huge discussions at the time about the bots. Everything you have said in your video was raised back then. However, Dan felt that bots were a fact of life, and not only would bots be curating, they'd be writing/spinning material too.
In the end what happened was they changed the curation distribution so the curators got 25% instead of 50% of the pot. And Ned started going through the introducemyself tab and upvoting everyone manually (that's how that tab became a thing!) to distribute some money, and the upset feelings died down for the moment.
My general feeling is that Ned is open to restricting the bots but Dan isn't. And it is because from the beginning the bots always upvoted Dan's stuff, and he made a lot of money from it.
This whole discussion is deja vu for me.
I don't think the developers will change their behaviour - but the community can collectively start upvoting stuff in the "New" tab, to defeat the bots. Bots only make money if lots of people vote after them. The minnows who vote after them add to the pot for that post, but don't really benefit as curators because their weight is too low. If minnows stop playing that game then the bots stop making money - and that is already happening.
BTW you might want to visit the #minnowsunite tab, there is a lot of original content on there.
P.S You might want to look at the Robin Hood Whale project which does a lot of stuff that you recommend in your video:
https://steemit.com/robinhoodwhale/@laonie/robinhoodwhale-27-08-2016
your comment inspired me to create this video :)
I think that on top of the deleterious effect of bot voting, bot-posting is a similar threat from the bottom up towards the ecosystem. I will just leave it at a simple remark, how on earth can a human-created content creator possibly outdo any human, when all the knowledge the bot might use is going to be taken from humans anyway. If people wanted to read AI commentary they would go and find it, if someone ever comes to thinking that it will do anyone any good. I don't see how it possibly can.
The whole AI=god/satan thing is such nonsense. Anyone who has read Accelerando would understand that humans will augment with them, and therefore, how could any pure AI system possibly exceed this capacity of the combination, and I haven't even addressed wetware augmentations that increase organic intelligence? AI's capacity to sacrifice also is non existent. Yes, you could code an AI to have some concept of risk, and moderating it in some way, but in the end, can you separate the human hand from the tools it creates? I don't think so. In the end the decision will be made clear in a court when a run-away AI murders its human servant-master, and the maker of the AI will be liable for murder.
yes, your words resonate, makes perfect sense to me