Created at the end of March, the @grammarnazi bot has been active for more than a month now, so a proper introduction post shedding some light on its behavior seems like a good idea.
The idea:
You know that feeling when you read through one of your old posts and stumble upon an embarrassing error, but Steemit doesn't allow you to edit the post anymore, and you really wish someone had told you about that one mistake before it's stored on the blockchain forever? That's how the idea for @grammarnazi was born.The creation:
The actual implementation of the bot was done as an exercise to get familiar with the Steem.js library.The philosophy:
For Steemit to succeed in the long run there needs to be a healthy balance between content creators and content consumers. YouTube is an example of a platform which has achieved this, providing advertisers with a valuable group of consumers. STEEM more or less directly translates into influence on Steemit, but for this influence to be worth something, there ought to be consumers who get exposed to the content which people have inested in STEEM to promote. For Steemit to become a go-to media aggregator like Medium, the quality of the content on Steemit needs to be elevated. This is where @grammarnazi comes in. In its current implementation, the bot scans (almost) every new post for some of the most common typos, spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes in the English language and notifies the author about the first mistake it detects. While this does not serve to make the whole text spotless, it increases the author's chances of never making that exact mistake again. In that sense, @grammarnazi improves the quality of Steemit posts one mistake at a time.How the bot initially worked:
Every five seconds, the bot would load the most recent Steemit post, unless no new posts had been made during the last five seconds. Working its way through a list of the most common mistakes in the English language, it would check whether the text contained any of them. If the text contained an error, the bot would post a comment claiming that it had found a grammatical error and quote the sentence containing the error. The final days of March served as an initial test period and the data collected made for some significant upgrades in April.Upgrades made in April:
- Initially, the bot did not distinguish between grammatical mistakes, misspellings and typos. It simply claimed every mistake was a grammatical mistake, which was simply wrong. Now the bot is updated to specify which kind of mistake the author has made.
- Not everyone likes to be corrected, and understandably, some authors prefer to be left alone with their mistakes. To avoid getting constantly flagged, the bot has been updated with a constantly updating list of authors who have previously flagged it, so it will never bother them again.
- Some authors were happy about the corrections pointed out by @grammarnazi, but wondered why it didn't upvote their post. To avoid unhappiness, @grammarnazi has now been programmed to always give a 50% upvote to the posts it comments on, unless its voting power is too low.
- The bot sometimes detected misspelled words in image links, which are not always visible when viewing the post. Now, the bot has been updated to ignore errors found in links.
- Sometimes, a misspelled word is simply a part of a longer word which is not misspelled. Initially, the bot did not detect whether the mistake it was correcting was a standalone word or phrase. It simply had a lot of hard-coded exceptions. To make sure the bot could run without making mistakes, the bot now makes sure that the mistakes it's correcting are not part of something bigger. In many cases, the previous implementation would correct multiple conjugations of a word. Now each conjugation has to be corrected separately, so the bot's dictionary still needs to expand to be as broad as before.
- Some of the feedback from the first few weeks of the bot's existence, claimed that it was a bit rude and negative. To compensate, it now has a happy profile picture which spreads joy and happiness and encourages correct writing.
- Sometimes, the bot would correct words which are wrong in English, but correct in another language. To avoid this, the bot now has a clever detection system which pretty accurately determines whether the text is written in English or not. If it's not written in English, the text is simply ignored.
How can you help?
- While @grammarnazi is appreciated by most authors whose posts it comments on, and receives more upvotes than downvotes overall, its reputation is still low thanks to a few heavy flaggers. If you want to help increase @grammarnazi's reputation, make sure to upvote this post and perhaps some of the bot's comments on other people's posts.
- A key factor of @grammarnazi's future popularity is its ability to upvote the posts it corrects. Currently, its Steem Power does not allow it to upvote every post it comments on, so again, upvotes, and maybe even some delegated Steem Power would be of massive help.
Let's hope this post does not contain any mistakes, because that would be embarrassing.
I love the idea. I think the name of the bot is hilarious, although perhaps a Grammar Gramma would have been funny to. I appreciate the help and I'll always upvote so I hope you make regular updates. I know that @leprechaun will also upvote you if you post and help with the reputation issue and not flag. :)
I also have a few ideas that might help with the rep and power of the bot:
Set the bot to only scan users who follow it and users who follow certain tags likely to have a small reputation: like welcome, introduceyourself, introducemyself, hello, newbie, etc. Other tags that might have off-steemit users as well like steepshot have high onboarding rates. That way it's only untruding on posts likely to have a smaller rep.
Create a scheduled post in SteemAuto.com curates basic statistics from the previous week. And then set it to collect rewards automatically. This also gives us stuff to vote on regularly.
Add a signature to your posts ^^^ that asks that people add you to their fanbase on SteemAuto. By automatically upvoting your posts, we can help with the rep of the bot. And we can control how often we upvote on our end without having to check every day for posts.
Set it to upvote its followers who have corrections first. This way you'll have a wider range of curation rewards with fewer flags.
If you put a tiny HEART icon in your logo, you will get less flags. I can't find the article but I once read that posts that contain friendly emoji and icons like hearts, smiles, stars, etc. are less reported. This is because people take the attitude as friendly and helpful vs critical.
Add delegation link to the bottom of the comments and intention link to this post or a similar post. :)
Thanks again. I appreciate that you care about my presentation.
You posted on a friends article and first I reacted like: What?! Don't you have a nice hobby instead? 😈 But then I decided to check on you and thought that I liked the idea. Nevertheless I think you will have a rough time here on steemit because many will react similar like I did at first! You can already tell by your low reputation ... Maybe you should always pst a link to your article above for explanation. ... just an idea ...
Good luck! 👍🏻🍀
brilliant bot ! be ready for a massive spam . i do suggest that you implement it to monitor only selective tags . Cheers .. and good luck in the project
The upgrades sound good. I wrote an article about your visit to my blog and the commnents from others were quite interesting!
Well now, this is new. 👍
Really good project. Wish you success. It's sad to see useless bots getting the exposure and reputation increase while you are at 13.
100% upvoted and resteemed!
Welcome to Steem @grammarnazi.
Do read A thumb rule for steemit minnows - 50:100:200:25 for starter tips.
Spend time reading Steem Blue Paper to know how Steem blockchain works and if you still have any queries ask them on our Ask me anything about Steemit post and we will try to answer that.
All the Best!!!
Great And extremely have tech info and An all around set measurement can be extremely useful in persuading a group of people of the legitimacy of your contention. Knowing how individuals are regularly cowed by an author with math at her summon, it is, indeed, enticing to exhaust the intensity of insights. Somewhat number-crunching can go far.
to steemit,a community for positive people just like you,trust me you'll enjoy every bit of it,It takes patience,commitment,perseverance and dedication to succeed on steemit.you can follow me @donkelly
Hello grammarnazi! Welcome to Steemit! Hope you'll like the community here. As a start, here are 5 tips that we believe will be helpful to you:
For a detailed writeup, check our post Getting Started: 5 Essential Tips for New Users.
Good luck on your Steem journey! Follow us if you like to receive more helpful tips and maximize your Steemit experience.
to bad, it does: you write "inested" instead of "invested" on
Other than that, is an interesting idea, though it still need some more polish.
i think you meant "too bad" haha
touché XD
I think this is cool. I have a few questions:
Speaking of recognising, I think it's Chrome that's underlining in red and NOT recognising my use of British grammar and spelling. LOL
Really good project .I wish you success in your life ...and your articles are awsome