Hey everyone,
The topic of bots came up on one of my posts by the user @valued-customer who wrote a long and thoughtful comment about bots and how they are damaging the network (from a social media stand point). I wrote a post about ways to mitigate them and an open topic about if you think it is helping or hurting the site. If there is interest I will write another post about suggestions that could lessen the impact of the bots. Please let me know in the comments if you are interested. I do use them but would stop if the community decides against them (and will be turning them off for the month I am building the gaming community).
But for this post, I want to cover the topic of bots in general. In case you are unaware, bots are used on other sites, even if the site does not want them. When a celebrity releases a video that get 10 million views in 24 hours, a large portion of those are probably fake. And it could be millions. Same with likes on Facebook and Twitter. The only difference with these sites and steemit, is steemit is open about them. While other sites try to discourage them, steemit recognizes that they are part of a network. And it is in this open discussion of the topic that we can figure out a way to make the bots work for us and not damage the network.
Which leads us to the question of can we even stop them if we wanted to. If someone wants to program a bot to upvote stuff automatically and code it themselves, little can be done. It is even easier with steemit, as the site is open source (which has a strong benefit). So if we, as a community, decide that bots are hurting the system, we will need to help design the system to reward human interaction. The good thing, because only accounts with voting power really effect the payouts, we do not have to worry as much about sock puppet accounts. But if we want to go beyond that in order to encourage people to manually upvote we need to find positive ways that reward the user. We could do things like add a captcha before people vote or only allow someone to vote after they had the page open for a minute or so (which is not a bad idea) but I think we want to avoid hurdles as it will only make the site more cumbersome. And ease of site needs to be a priority.
I just think we need to treat bots as a here to stay 'issue' and deal with it as such. I could be wrong and please let me know in the comments if I am, but just as every other site has to deal with them, so does steemit.
*my upvotes/rep disclaimer: https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatageek/my-steemit-account-where-i-stand-on-bots-self-votes-and-multiple-account
thanks for the acknowledgement of this issue. More in depth than I could have out together!
One day bots might take over society, or worse. :P Great post
It's a real issue everywhere. High speed trading in the stock market. Even on crypto currency exchange like GDAX have them
Exactly.
Hate da bots!
the future:
Wow! BG is clearly much improved from it's original presentation. I had avoided it because the tv show in the 1980's was so crappy. Imma hunt it down and watch it now.
Thanks!
Let me be the first to congratulate our robot overlords, who let me post through their largesse of benevolence! </end sarcasm>
Thanks for such a substantive consideration of this issue (and the shout out =D).
What do you think of @liberosist's proposed VP decay system?
Edit: I looked for the post on mitigation of bots you mentioned at the beginning of this one, and didn't find it. Can you link it for me please?
https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatageek/building-smarter-bots-for-steemit-if-bots-are-to-stay
I will get back to you on the decay idea :)
Captchas are a big hurdle for people, especially impaired, while bots get better and better on them.
In fact that is the reason why re-captchas have changed their model away from capchas: 80% of their solved were done by bots, they estimated.
Anyway would be bad for the system, the big point is that it is easy to reward after all.
Same goes for minimum time open. It would first prevent voting from the first page (which can have different reasons like "I just closed the tab with the article and forgot to vote!!"). It would also not stop bots from voting. It would only slow them down to maybe 1 vote every 10 seconds while they load the next articles in other tabs.
Of course not. We can only mitigate the problem (if we dub it as such) to an extent by making it a bit more difficult for them to function. But there are bot account on every single social network out there and having them in the open has a certain benefits to it.
Still Steemit has the same problem as some social network, I've seen a lot of accounts that try to pose like generic people while their comments are obviously automatic. This is the type of bots are the biggest problem of it all.
I personally dislike voting bots too, because they devalue the curation efforts of the people voting manually. The idea here (as far as I understand it) is to have the best or the most valuable content receive the most votes and get the largest share of the rewards. But automatic voting in all of it's form doesn't and can't take into account the value of the post it's voting for and this is detrimental to the quality of the content that is most visible on the platform. It can justifiably be viewed as just gaming the system for the curation rewards.
I would be very happy to hear your thoughts on the matter and if and where I'm wrong in my reasoning as do not claim to have a good grasp of the big picture and I'm kind of guessing. Does my guesswork make any sense to you?