If @themarkymark don't want people to promote "shit posts" (his words) with bots only to make money from the direct ROI, then maybe he (and all bot owners) can simply decide to cap the "direct ROI" of their bots to zero. This way people promoting posts always pay some money in the process (direct ROI < 0), and this is the cost of the promotion.
After all people must always "pay something" to the bot when they want to add some "promotion value" to a post and never gain a direct ROI.
With a cap to the "direct ROI" to 0 it's sure that at the end there is always a cost in every promotion, note that the "final ROI" can be >0 for legitimate promotion:
- for legitimate content (with value content > 0) the "final ROI" of a promotion come from the sinergy: "good promotion" + "good post value" -> "final ROI" >0.
- when "post value" = 0 ("shit posts"), "final ROI" = "direct ROI", both always negative.
At the moment the bot promoting system it's far from the economic equilibrium and everyone have "direct ROI" > 0 from every kind of promotion, this is not good.
To have ROI < 0 for all posts is not a bad idea at all.
This means people, only if they believe in the value of their posts will promote their posts.
For ROI>0 on value content, this would need someone to curate all the posts as value and non-value content.
Sometimes the border is very thin and bots,even humans can not do this.
The best is to comment it @themarkymark post. I am sure he will reply you back.
FD.
The best way to solve this is an instant bot, but everyone will just use the ones that do give them an ROI.
Yes, you cannot solve the problem alone. It's a tricky one. And probably it's not a technical issue, it's an human issue. It's like a war game: stakeholders must constantly act to promote quality and to avoid short term exploits of the platform.
That is correct...free market rules and game theory involved.
Maybe @steemcleaners can publish a bot abusers digest that bots can ... digest as a blacklist. This way bids from certain blacklistees will just be auto rejected.
@steemcleaners digest can be crowdsourced by users.
I recommend this because some people are not in the habit of useless posts. They also aren't trying to abuse or they think information is generally useful that others do not. Some of these are newer users that just don't know any better.
I think having a curated blacklist that users can get on through community vetting and also maybe earn their way off by producing valuable content would be useful. Not only would some users not be offended, but there's a path to rehabilitation for abusers.
I'd like to point out that @steemcleaners has created an economy out of crowdsourcing abuse vetting curators. I think leveraging the data they mine into bot abuse is the obvious move.
Help me stop @grumpycat
Just read the post below and resteem if you agree...
https://steemit.com/life/@firedream/stop-the-grumpycat
FD.