Bad Bots!!!
As a fairly new contributor on Steemit, I arrived here with great determination... to grow my channel and my blog. I began posting with a vengence, sometimes posting 4 times per day. Over time, my excitement dwindled as I wasn't earning anything relative to the time I spent creating content. It began to appear to me to be a bad return on my invested time. I occasionally had a post or two that racked up a few upvotes here and there and I continued to create, though at less than blazing speed. One thing that really disgruntled me the most was when I would spend the time to create a long thought out article, only to get NO upvotes or comments (except from a bot or a spammed comment).
Speaking of Spammed comments - Here is a one and only comment on a recent post of mine- "nice beach in Guam. . amazing. . how i wish i could also visit that place..
I'm forming a community on my account. I hope you'll be part of this campaign. Come follow me back and upvote my post if you find it relevant. You will get some tips for your steemit journey. Thanks"
The above comment was followed with six links to this member's articles and was then followed with "These are on the following post that I have wherein you can Learn from it and take ACTION!. Please come follow me and upvote my post. I highly appreciate it. Thank you very much Steemit Friends"
While I doubt that this self-centered spammer even spent much time on my post, he wasted my time, his time, and possibly drove or took other potential commenters away. The saddest thing: This person DID NOT even give me an upvote! What a scumbag! I muted him (@dmitrywong) SPAMMER!!!! Personally, I'm not one to hang around a post very long if I see nothing but Spam and Bots! Anyway, I regress... Spammers are not bots, but they are worthy of their own execution! Back to the Bots...
I Came To Blog and Earn!
I know, I know... it has been said that one should post on certain days of the week at certain times for maximum exposure. I have since deemed that as being bunk, because it never worked for me. While I'm sure there is a "best" time to post, it is not the ONLY time to post to gain readership. At this point, and after over 6 weeks of active Steemit participation, I was hoping to get ANY exposure! I learned that I was getting more spam and BOT coverage than I cared for. I began to limit my postings and then eventually almost stopped posting entirely. I quickly learned that while good content can make the author good money, it was only a select few making this money. Over time, I learned that the real earnings power, at least for us minnows on Steemit, lies in curration and commenting.
Not a Paradigm Shift!
I shifted my focus away from authoring posts and into increased post-interaction by commenting and currating. My account has grown slowly, albeit steadily, but seeminly faster than relying on content creation. Steemit is definitely NOT a get-rich-quick scheme, but it is a multi-faceted platform that takes some effort to achieve results. I never thought it was, but apparently some do! Those who think they can circumvent the proof-of-work concept and earn the lazy way - with robots. And they might even achieve some level of success - but at what expense? The expense of destroying Steemit from within!
When I was posting regularly, there was no shortage of being inundated with the Upvote Bots and the Follow Me bots, and the Follow Me, I'll Follow You bots. Then there are the You Follow-I Follow and Then I will Upvote You type bots! Can you see where this is going? These bot "comments" are neither creative or constructive and contribute absolutely nothing to the conversation, and are designed to avoid doing anything that was originally intended, like creating something useful. In my opinion, they just waste space on the blockchain.
Bots Are Destroying Steemit which inspired me to write this post. The strength of anything can only be attributed to the strength of the weakest link, and Steemit definitely has one big weak link: BOTs.There have been many Steemit posts about the good and bad in Steemit bots. More bad than good I would say. Today I read a new posting by @distress2success titled
booster
bot-helper
bot-helper
bottymcbotface
calva
cheetah
deutschbot
gaman
goodbot
ionlysaymeep
lovejuice
minnowbooster
minnowsupport
moisesmcardona
onlymanamana
randowhale
screenname
steemcleaners
steemitboard
steemster3
tippy
twitterbot
wang
weenis
welcomebotI remembered a post by @jesta a couple months ago that included a listing of bots:
The State of Steemit is not strong because of the leaches.
I'm certain that the above list is not all-inclusive. There are probably many more. And while some of the aforementioned bots might be helpful to the community, most bots are becoming a real drain on the Steemit platform as a whole. Those are the Steemit Leaches! I'm sure I will piss off any bot dev out there who might read this and take offense, but in my conclusion, I must agree with that most recent post by @distress2success above. Bots are destroying Steemit from within like a plague. My feelings are this: If Steemit was such a great platform (which I believe it could be), then why can Steemit NOT stand alone on its own merits? Think about that - If Steemit was so strong, the price of Steem WOULD NOT be so directly tied to the price of Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency for that matter.
In Protest!
Any bot that serves NO communal purpose other than to enrich the lives of a few creative developers, are bad for this community. Steemit needs good content creators. As long as the Steemit allows it ranks to be filled with Bot developers, Steemit will never go anywhere. And the future... I can envision Steemit dying in robotic fashion.So in protest, and in line with the post of @distress2success above, I hereby denounce and submit my vote that
Let's Get rid of the Steemit Leaches!
How to do that is beyond the scope of my knowledge, but I did see a suggestion in another post that Witnesses should be the gate-keepers when it comes to approving and/or removing any bot on the platform. Maybe if the community bans together, we all can make some real progress - and many more newcomers to the Steemit platform might just find it a more useful place to stay.
Please Resteem for widest possible dissemination. Thanks!
It is a good discussion topic, but what you talk about is very difficult - if not nearly impossible - to actually accomplish, due to the nature of the blockchain technology. Bots are here to stay. We have to find a way to co-exist.
What you brought up about 'leaches' though is interesting. IMO, there is a difference between wanting to get rid of bots and wanting to get rid of leaches. It is also a very difficult problem to solve, but may be a better objective. After all, if someone wrote a bot to somehow detect and downvote leaches, would having that bot be bad?
The answer to your last question is no. There is plenty of room for good bots, it's the bad ones that need to be exterminated (maybe through flagging and exposure, I'm not sure). Don't bots have their own account that could be disabled via the Witness program or by some other means? I'm kinda a noob at this and just offering up this topic for discussion. Thanks for your comment and Upvote @timcliff .
It would be against the principles of being a witness to exclude transactions from the blockchain. Going down that path would do a lot of harm to the network and token.
Other bot developers could hypothetically develop good bots to counter the bad bots though. There have already been a few cases of 'bot wars' that have played out on the blockchain.
That's all we need - a Bot War on Steemit! I only suggest that Witnesses could help to identify or "flag" the bad bots, not interfere with posting of content. Bots could be banned for innapropriate or bad behavior.
I agree about the disappointment in investing a lot of time to not get a lot of upvotes. It definitely seems that people who post frequent and short articles do better. However, I disagree with the outright antibot sentiment. I recently wrote a post about bots being good or evil. Bad bots should be flagged just like bad humans.
I agree, there are good bots like Cheetah and Steemcleaners. We need the good bots.
This is my first look at it thanks for sharing @retiredinsamar
Ban the Bad Bots!
NO! Now here is a great example of what I just talked about in my post! People are not here to post content, but to spam and pilfer! SO, now we have Bots, Spammers, and Pilferers among us! He DID NOT even leave Upvote! Scum.