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RE: This hardfork should make some people happy
As opposed to right now where there is a huge and recent influx of users & bots making what I consider "shitposts" , beg for votes , or complain about whales not upvoting them ?
@weenis is a good example of recent poster of spam comments that contributes nothing (then again, he's either a badly coded bot, or doesn't realize that his voting power is practically nil)
I did however find the post where a user posted trying to flag weenie and weenie upvoted it, but it's true. I don't want bots to dictate content or curation. It's somewhat different if someone allows you to have your content upvoted by them, but that means you've earned the trust of someone and their reputation is on the line. Some people don't mind weenie and he or it is relatively harmless at the moment, but to have to scroll through many bot posts to interact with the original poster should not be in steemit future. At least is my opinion.
About @weenis I can't be certain, but I think both him and @Wang are owned by the same people / persons. They are both childish references to male anatomy and sound like names picked by some people I know. I see names here at steemit from forums and channels I hang around in and some of these guys are talented bot builders including the first guy who showed me how to build a proper bot.
But just like hackers, there are good and bad.
Some guys will literally build a bot to troll you just for the lulz. They don't care about the voting power. It's really, just to annoy you and there's no penalty, so why not? They can get paid for it? That's even better!
We need more tools, not more rules
If you know it's a bot and it's annoying you, there should be tools to deal with it. For example, downvoting them should cause them to lose actual money after awhile and once they are 0 they can't post anymore.
Simple rules like that fix the problem without limiting the freedom of speech this site claims to support and would also support the creation of useful bots like the tipbot at reddit or the crossposting / link bot at reddit. Or like the IRC bots, which give new users the rules and guide them through important concepts so we don't end up with an Eternal September on our hands once the flood gates open here again.
On a side note, speaking as a programmer I consider all of my bots to be my speech. I'm sure if you ask around you'll find plenty others who feel likewise. They speak for me, they say what I want them to say. Playing with AI is fun, I have a dozen IRC bots and 4 or 5 slack bots that do useful things in addition to trading bots that make money. They are nothing but force multipliers that make me more effective and productive so I have more free time to do things like post here.
I don't turn them on here because I believe I can have a more enjoyable time posting on my own. However it already feels like an empty room in here. People can't see what others are posting because it takes a whale voting to keep you up long enough to get the conversation started. That's a curation issue. I don't claim to be the smartest guy in the world, but I have ideas that could be useful and yet no matter what I do they never get enough eyeballs to matter.
I have ideas that could fix the signal to noise ratio here without changing a single thing about the site. But I won't build it unless I know that people will use it because it takes people using it in order for it work. I hope folks give it serious thought and help me pick it apart. I genuinely believe it represents a solid future for social media as a whole.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach