This is a very interesting article!
I'm not sure yet where my thoughts are on this issue, but I am trying to read all points of view on bots and how to deal with them here.
I want to see this great experiment called steem/steemit succeed and I think that even though a great deal of planning obviously went into creating this place, we are still experiencing some learning by trial and error.
We have to do our homework (for example by reading and evaluating articles like this), but then we have to act, and see what comes of our actions. I look forward to every new day at Steemit!
Thanks! When push comes to shove, bots are owned by people. Talk to people, tell them to build better more useful bots like cheetah and jeeves and to obey a few simple rules and the rest sorts itself. Fix the trending algorithm to reflect the will of the majority of the people rather than the majority of the money. Hide how much people are earning in order to stop resentment. Do that and the system comes back into balance rather quickly.
No simple fixes, but lots of little tweaks and this place will totally blow away every other social media platform out there. Alienate users and it's going to be a bunch of bored people having bot wars.
Lol, bored people having bot wars. Great description!
@casandrarose has my vote for comment of the year with this one!
The issue is the money is double purposed. It is being used to protect against many fake accounts especially ones that are not vested in the platforms growth. Until we have metrics that identify unique people from fake accounts we have to use something like this. You are 100% correct and this is coming.
An alternative might be to explicitly allow the creation of subaccounts and a "botkey" system. This way the bot is tagged at the blockchain level.
The real issue is that what the core development team have created is the ultimate role playing game and the ruleset is just unbalanced. This has potential, it can work really, really well and on the whole it does already.
But rulesets need to account for all the dynamics in the system. This includes trying to figure out why people are spending effort to grief the system. Tweak the rules and restore balance and everything else will sort itself out. Have to be careful about the tweaks though.