RE: TransparencyBot - Daily Report Card as of Yesterday 5/14/18
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My campaign started with this article dated 2/6/18 and continued forward with multiple articles that used bidbots and futher exposed how bidbots could be used to bring ANY article, both of high quality and low, onto the trending list.
It reads:
No really, this is a post on nothing of use, not anything in particular and certainly nothing worth upvoting.
But it may well serve to be very useful tool in demonstrating some of the techniques used by many Steemian's, whales and minnows alike to grab a few (or a lot) of votes for rather marginal or useless articles.
If you have ever wondered why some articles you read and some authors you run across have SO many upvotes and so many followers, well stay tuned --- I'll be exposing some of these techniques is the days ahead.
All profits for the article and the remaining articles using bots were donated!
@Transparencybot is a continuation of the campaign by many to bring quality back to the trending list.
Firstly, the trending list can't be fixed. You should have learned this by now. It can't be fixed especially by going after bot usage. Not that I am for/against bots. I think all things can be abused, so it's moot. What is important is that it's a minor part of the problem. In fact, if bot abuse went away, it would just exacerbate the other issues because a decrease in bot abuse leads to an increase in curation abuse.
You get the picture. There are people that vote simply for the curation and others that vote to help out people they know. It's not to improve the content whatsoever. This leads to a its-about-who-you-know where the more whales you know, the more successful you are situation.
Unfortunately, that also throws off the trending page. It's just less prevalent because bot abuse is so pervasive at the moment.
That's only part of it though. Besides the trending page being unfixable, it also shouldn't be fixed because it's a bad idea in the first place. A trending page makes sense for other forms of social media; however, steemit's unique community and the fact that there's a revenue stream attached makes it so that any feed is gamed for monetary benefit. EVEN THIS BOT is an example of that and therefore proof that it's unfixable. The concept of the trending page is that more popular items float to the top, but popularity is determined by votes which are monetarily determined. More money improves voting (investment). The only way to move higher up the trending page is to throw more money at it. This gives an unfair advantage to users that have been here longer as well as those with just tons of disposable income/savings.
This is actually where bot abuse comes in. Users that normally wouldn't have the ability to move up the trending page now can do so. This includes spammers, scammers, and legitimate content creators alike. Bots are a double-edged sword. Finally users can move up the trending page, but at a cost of bad content moving up with them.
In the end, it's the trending page that is bad, not the bots. If this account wants to help the trending page, this bot is also bad. Not to mention, it's an obvious scam itself.
Thanks for the reply.
I really agree with many of your points and it is a very complex problem. I do believe there will be multiple 3rd party fixes to this problem that will eventually cause Steemit @ned to make some very needed changes to allow better filtering and sorting on both the trending page and personal feeds.
Here is a great example.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemlookup/introducing-steemlookup-filtering-tool
There are a lot of good solutions including custom condensers like Busy, SteemPlus or SugarSteem
@ned and steemit inc. may not be the solution. One of the points behind steem is to be decentralized. A single condenser is counter intuitive to that. While steemit inc really puts in a lot of work and effort to make improvements and bring features, it's unreasonable to assume all problems can and will be fixed.
Any of those are worth investing in and supporting over this bot. Admittedly this bot isn't a solution and distracts from real solutions.