A lot of people who participate of this space have brought up this very idea plenty of times in the past. Their motivation is simple to understand, and I would even call it noble. But, it does seem to be a pandora box we will never close again.

Ahh... the memories

queue flashback...

The twitter bid

In my opinion Elon was right to call out Twitter's bot problem. As a matter of fact. Before buying Twitter, now X, he constantly bashed the user metrics, quoting different sources on this very subject.

Officially, Twitter estimates that the number of bots on its platform is around 5%. Going by Twitter's last reported monthly active users of 330 million, detailed in a Statista report, it means there are around 16.5 million bots on Twitter. Unfortunately, the 5% figure is a very debatable statistic.

Research by reputable organizations puts the figure much higher, with some going as high as 20%. A 2017 paper by researchers at the University of Southern California and Indiana University [PDF] puts the figure between 9% and 15%. Botometer, a platform for checking bot followers, puts the stats at around 20%.

Do keep in mind these are the old numbers, and they are likely to be higher at this point.

Yes, even Elon has not been able to solve "the problem of bots". The very thing he knew was the reason for the valuation of twitter being "incorrect" at the time of his purchase.

Side note: I'm willing bet the "bot thing" has gotten so bad these days, that this is most likely the very reason why X now seems like a cesspool of disgusting propaganda.

• Exhibit a: I've been getting Nazi ads lately.

Engagement

It should be important for this conversation to have any weight, to attempt to define at it's core what it is that the bots are trying to do. And, the one word I can think of, while not being perfect, is: Engagement.

Any narrative, any idea or product for that matter, can be inflated with activity. A flurry of users possibly powered by AI at this point, can be all controlled by a special interest to create the illusion of consensus or dissent.

This faux engagement works, because us humans, simple minded social creatures that we are, can be lured by tribe think. What does my team say-- part of the daily questions that orbit our mind.

You could argue, and some do, that faux engagement is a weapon of sorts. The battle of information sounds cliche, like the title of a terrible B rated film, but it's as real as taxes these days and that's hard to ignore.

But aside from this point, as important as it may be, I keep on coming back to the notion that faux engagement by it's very design also creates faux value, fake valuation.

All bots matter

Before somebody shplocks (new word my wife and I came up with) at my face, I should say:

Not all bots are bad and/or undesired

And if we are to discuss this subject with honesty, we should be willing to concede that fact. As with many tools us humans have created, in the end, it matter how it's used, how it's implemented above everything else.

Ask any discord user with a few years under his/her belt about bots, and I'm sure you will reach the conclusion that the Discord experience would be greatly damaged if they were to be removed from that platform altogether.

Which allows me to arrive to our predicament on this very platform.

Hive Bots, Hive Automation

I'm willing to accept the fact that most of the quality content posted on this platform is probably not perused, not really. It may be consumed, if you will, glanced at, but the comments often read under carefully drafted blogs make this sad point quite evident.

The curation trails often lead by cleverly programmed bots, do an OK job at maintaining the illusion of engagement, but just like it happens on widely popular platforms, here, most of the activity is not human.

A pessimists then, would look at what I've presented as proof that Hive is doomed, that this experiment of ours is a farce.

Be a blogger, they said
Make money, they said
a bad joke!
Nobody reads my shit anyways...

I'm sure there's a non-negligible number of users who came here under the empty promise of Utopia and left Hive with a bitter taste in their mouths.

The truth, and I won't call it "a sad" truth, is that we are not that different, at least in this sense, from other social media experiments out there. We have a lot of bot activity and a good chunk of it is disruptive. (bcpvoter comes to mind)

That being said, and as I said at the very start of this post, that pandora box cannot be closed. Crying over spilt milk doesn't produce cheese as far as I can tell.

But let's work on a helpful conclusion to this dim reality we reside in, what say you?

For this allow me to deploy a detour, an analogy that will help you and me think of this in a healthier way.

Let's talk about microbiota

Yes, the bacteria that live inside our gut. There's a lesson there for us to apply to life, and also specifically to our current topic.

Not all the bacteria that makes our gut it's residence is bad for us, and as a matter of fact some of them have an essential role that allows our existence, and that is not an exaggeration.

Take Lactobacillus for example: It helps break down food, produces vitamins like B12 and K, and strengthens the gut barrier to keep harmful pathogens out. It’s a friendly resident that supports digestion and boosts our immune system.

On the flipside, sporting the colors of a Sith Lord we have Clostridium difficile: A bacteria that if not kept in check can literally kill us simply giving us the worse case of the Montezuma curse (diarrhea).

A healthy gut maintains balance through diversity and competition. Good bacteria outnumber and suppress the bad ones. Yes, we need to do our part, eat healthy and what have you. But the important message or lesson we need to take from this is that the tug-of-war is part of nature, part of the ecosystem.

So...

Should we be actively working towards the destruction of "all artificial activity" in our Blockchain, making sure every single action was done by a human clicking away on his computer?

I hope you and I can answer this more easily now, since the writing does seem to be on the wall.

Imagine us deciding tomorrow that our gut is only to have good bacteria, and thus begin taking antibiotics like flintstone vitamins daily for a year. We will eliminate all bad bacteria, that's for sure, but not without eliminating ourselves along the way.

Food for thought...

MenO