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RE: Will bots take over Steemit?

in #steem8 years ago (edited)

Definitely an issue. Reading up and looking at the posts and comment sections here I have been trying to wrap my head around the bots. There seem to be a few kinds:

  1. Autovote bots that follow the poster and autovote only their own posts and comments. (black hat)
  2. Possible spam post creation bots, appear to plagiarize content from elsewhere and produce posts here with it. One of the biggest problems because their crap pushes real content producer posts off the pages faster.
  3. Bots fighting plagiarism (white hat) but appear to be outnumbered by plagiarism bots.
  4. Random voting bots (probably white hats?)
  5. Possible chat bots that try to get you to like and follow by posting comments like "Great post! Check out my stuff and follow me!"? (black hat) But then they don't actually use their voting power to upvote your stuff.
  6. For all the bots, almost certainly non-posting bots that just run the numbers and create email addys and flood the registration process, slowing down "real" membership growth. (black hat)
  7. Massive bot pools posting and circle-upvoting each other, likely don't bother following or interacting with anyone else, but post comments to deter suspicion. (black hat)
  8. Probably a few downvote bots out there made by haters? Who knows? (black hat)

Also, one of the tactics appears to be tagging the posts not with a traditional tag so it appears in a category, but with only the name of the account posting it, maybe so other bots can more easily find and upvote them? This would make hunting in the usual categories by plagiarism/spam hunting bots less effective perhaps?

I am not a bot programmer, so I don't really know what the limitations are, but if it can be scripted I guess it can be done. For all I know one bot can do all of that stuff above.

All I know is my number of followers is almost 100, but I haven't even gotten 40 upvotes on my genuinely self-produced content posts, but my comments sometimes get short replies and are upvoted. I then check if the content looks good then follow and upvote. In checking my follower list I found plagiarism stuff and unfollowed, but I am worried that is the tactic to get non-botters to follow and upvote bot stuff.

I don't know. I have only been here a month and have a full time job, so I can watch this stuff all the time. But there is definitely the feeling something is off. I have made a few comments in similar posts where whales seem to circle, here's to hoping Steemit doesn't drown in bots.