While we write articles fueled with creativity, comment, and help each other out, we can witness a full Steem-scale real global war of bots.
Exalted knights with their rep being well over 60 and Steem Power over 1,000 do not talk about this war as it doesn’t affect them directly. However, newcomers often experience the consequences of bot’s hostile activities.
A typical example is @r4fken’s bot. This bot (SP>3,000) doesn’t even try to touch experienced veteran users. Instead, it focuses its attention on newcomers. Bot’s actions are simple in their nature but the consequences are quite destructive. The bot marks fresh posts from newcomers as spam effectively removing them from Steem feed and nullifying their chances to attract users and earn at least a couple of cents.
Undoubtedly, many of users experienced negative actions from @r4fken. These hostile activities can do nothing but disappoint, upset, and puzzle everyone. However, it wasn’t @r4fken who started the war.
The Start of Warfare.
It all started after @cheetah (SP>4,000) was created as an anti-plagiarism bot. The creator of this bot is @anyx (SP>11,000). The bot functionality is based on checking its own ban-list. Whenever a user gets on the list, all his posts and comments start being downvoted by @cheetah to the oblivion.
@r4fken was called out on plagiarism and ended up in @cheetah’s ban-list. Practically, it was like a death mark from a deadly cheetah and this mark usually heralds an inevitable death of Steem account as any messages generated by this account will be marked as spam. At the same time, a whole army of @cheetah’s followers immediately downvote anyone on bot’s ban-list. In general, if you end up on @cheetah’s ban-list, your account is doomed.
@r4fken didn’t have enough Steem Power to fight off the pressure from @cheetah. Especially, if its followers are taken into consideration. Maybe his anger was the reason why @r4fken decided to strike at “commoners” of Steem.
Surprisingly, his actions were quite consequential. His strike was sudden and hurtful. Hundreds of users could feel the anger and hatred emanating from @r4fken. Dozens of posts and constant discussions in the chat made him just as infamous as Herostratus notorious for burning down the temple of Artemis in Ancient Greece.
The Current State of Affairs.
The community quickly found a new tactic to counter @r4fken’s bot actions. The most obvious solution was to immediately upvote posts that were downvoted by the bot. A new bot that would do that was created ¬– @mione (SP>1,000). This bot proved to be quite efficient as his strength was equal to that of @r4fken. Now, @mione successfully and nearly instantaneously brings back from darkness posts that were downvoted by @r4fken effectively nullifying his negative influence.
A Happy End? Not Even Close!
In the end, @mione ended up on the ban-list of @cheetah. @cheetah and his team strike at @mione rendering his less effective.
At the same time, another war bot entered the stage. We talk about @highasfuck (SP>10,000). This bot has a very strange logic and works a mirror entity of @r4fken. Everything that @r4ken downvotes @highasfuck upvotes and vice versa.
Who created @highasfuck and were his motives – these are questions that one cannot answer easily. In July, Steem was hacked and @highasfuck is just one of stolen accounts. Notice that cyber-attacks were committed by the creator of the bot.
This entangled mess of bot fights I tried to illustrate schematically to the extent of my limited artistic merits. You can observe my efforts in an image at the beginning of this article.
The Future of Steem.
Note that everyone here operates with deposits well over $1000. Each of the bot creators is a wealthy man and each of them has enough coding knowledge to create sophisticated scripts.
As we all know, survival is the foundation of evolution. The warfare between bots will inevitably lead to more complicated code lines and more sophisticated features. Simultaneously, it is unclear whether this evolution will bring anything positive as most of the bots were created with destructive purposes in mind.
Curiously, will the community neutralize bots’ activity? I hope that it will. The only solution I see is that we need to ignore bots’ actions regardless of the intentions of their creators. Steem is a social network for real human beings! Our decisions should be dictated by our emotions and intuition. Otherwise, bots will evolve and enslave us (not humanity, obviously, but the Steem platform).
Wow, one of the stolen accounts got turned into a bot? I thought all stolen accounts had been restored to their owners?
@mione was on cheetahs black list for plagiarism (check their previous post history), this is completely unrelated to the r4fken actions. This has been resolved today after I chatted with @mione, whom has agreed to discontinue plagiarizing, and is no longer on the blacklist.
Well "common users" couldn't care less about this war.But getting flagged for zero reasons is very annoying. I mean I got flagged, got annoyed and reposted my article. but it was kinda too late. That's a very annoying mean and stupid behavior.
All these voting bot people are just full of shit, either way. The self proclaimed board police and PC control has to go. These bloggers are a real annoying nuisance.
The downvoting feature alone is as necessary as dogshit under your shoe.
What we really need are user adjustable content filters and bots for content classification.
Thanks for clearing this up. I had noticed some of those names on my own posts but hadn't done the research or made any connections. Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power (at least according to Schoolhouse Rock).
We are safe until bots will not begin mining and programming new bots))