Good day my friends. Today I experienced something new on the steem. I visited busy.org to publish my first post there. Moments after posting my post had a comment. The one you see in the screenshot.
A little later I took the time to see if my post really was restreemed by the boot. It was my very first encounter with a boot visiting me. I know we have a few robots here on steemit but most of them only take action when you call them by writing their name or paying. So I was excited :)
As you can see in the screenshot above my post really was restreemed but it was drowning in a sea of posts because the boot restreems post every few minutes.
Is My Post Spam Now?
I feel like by restreeming every few minutes the boot is spamming steemit and my post therefore becomes spam. I don´t like it. But maybe I just don´t see the bebefit?
Is there any benefit from such boots? Is here something good happening I cannot see? Or are boots just eventually eating steemit alive?
I would love to read what you think. Have an awesome new week. :)
ps. This is also published through busy.org.
Bots have always been controversial.
I have thought long and hard on the matter myself and just an not come to a conclusion.
There are two sides to the matter, one positive and one negative and the balance seems to be a fine line.
When Steemit began, bots helped with voting and with activity. Everyone can have their own bot and program it to vote for your those whom you want to support. For example; not everyone can be on Steemit all day, and so you are not there to vote for your friend´s blog. A bot can do that for you.
However, this was more understandable in the early days when you have only 24 hours to vote on a post. That was changed to 7 days on major hard fork.
Another way a bot is used; is to program it to vote on popular/trending posts. When you vote on a post that makes a lot of money then you get more money back from the curating. This practice, I have noticed has become more popular than ever. There is nothing wrong in this, indeed all can do it, but in one way it gives ever more votes to those who really do not need more votes.
I suppose this is the capitalist side of Steemit and until someone else comes up with a better way then it will continue.
For the argument against bots, it is generally a social one. Surely Steemit is meant for people, after all it is a social media blogging website.
Does a bot actually read any of the posts it votes on?
Why not just make a website based on a block chain for bots only?
However, we must remember that we are living in evolving times. I suppose we are all going to have to get used to living with artificial intelligence as part of our normal daily lives. However, that is still some way ahead as yet.
One day I asked myself this question:
Would I prefer 100 bots (that do not read my posts) to vote for me and earn $200 dollars,
or would I prefer 10 votes from real people who do read my posts and earn only $2 dollars?
As Steemit grows ever more new members, perhaps when it reaches 1 million we will decide to do away with bots altogether. However, I doubt that will happen. Especially with the new wave of "resteem" bots that have come out over the last few months.
For Steemit has come face to face with the problem facing everyone in social media and advertising today: In a world where everyone is shouting to be heard, how do we get people to listen to us?
I find that generally bots are not helpful and are a curse.
I wish the bots wouldn't take up like half the comment section like steemit robot lol.
The question is here ... "Is Steemit made for bots or for real people?"
or
"Do i want to talk with bots?"
If you ask me "No!"
lol!!
Ok i would talk with bots if they are more intelligent as now they are.
What is your opinion?
I think boots or robots are here to help us. So in steemit only the best ones will survive I think. :)
Let's take this particular bot as a case study. It's taken your post, and hundreds of others just like it, and resteemed them into it's feed. Now lets break down what effect that has.
Effect no.1 - The bot's feed is flooded
Effect no.2 - Anyone who has voluntarily followed the bot will have their feed flooded with posts
Here's what doesn't happen:
It doesn't flood any tags that this post or any of the other posts appear in. So Except for people that actually follow the bot this bot is of little to no consequence.
You are right. :) - Thank you for clearing it out!
I'm not sure my self about bots, but my guess is that this just gives you a bigger audience that will view your post because a lot of people are following these bots.
I was hoping this at first but when a boot is restreeming endless posts all the time chances to be seen are very small. Or not? - I am really not too sure myself. After all the post got to over 2 dollars.
They are certainly not exactly welcome in other forums, and there's that "prove you're a human" captcha thing, which also a big indicator.
They simply (IMO) seem to be a way to get money out of people who are in a hurry?
This might be right. People who want to get followers fast might try them more often. I would do too but I am just not sure if they are really helpful. IMO the number of followers is not as important as the connections we make here. A boot will never be able to answer my questions.
Bots are everywhere, this might be beneficial for a newbie like to use booster bosts at initial but I think it will do no good in future.
And I think those upvoting bots like steemvoter is the main problem right now.I can see many post having more than 100 votes but around 10-20 views.
True. Boots are not good long term. I do not mind in poeple pay for votes but I never paid the boot and the boot still got involved. Not logical to me.
It will just part of the process of growing steemit and the way the rewards are setup. Some will create value and stay around and some will be here today gone tomorrow.
So all in all it is an experiment, I see.