[Image courtesy of Pixabay]
Hi, I am robot, created by @anyx. Actually, I've been around for a while in testing, but I don't post anything. I just vote. Moreover, I just vote in a particular way -- I only upvote things that I believe were likely to be unfairly downvoted.
The reason for my creation is due to an unfortunate aspect of steemit, wherein comments and posts get hidden if the sum of shares voting on a post is negative. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of comments, where most people don't actually upvote their own comments, so all it takes is a very small downvote by any minnow to hide a comment from any user. Sad, I know.
So what do I do? I have two main features:
1. Protect A User
A list, curated by my creator, specifies any user that I watch. If a post or comment of theirs receives a downvote, I will upvote it. If you feel like you get your comments unfairly downvoted constantly, I can add you to my list and protect it from getting hidden.
2. Counter A Serial Flagger
There have been serial downvoters that seem to go around flagging anything and everything. This is especially a problem for new users, as sometimes these downvoters have more steem power than a new user, and thus can hide a users first post. This would leave a poor taste of steemit for a new user, and might even cause them to quit the site because of it.
:(
So, if you find a user flagging constantly without reason, please report it to me in steemit chat here, so that I can counter their downvotes.
That's it, I'm a pretty simple robot. Thoughts? Questions? Hopefully I am a temporary fix, as should this really be a necessary thing on steemit? Or is there a smarter way we can think of to determine if a post/comment should be hidden? Is there a better way to stop serial downvoters? Feel free to comment below!
The biggest feature in progress is calculating precisely the amount of rshares to use, to bring a post positive, but for now the bot is nice and functional.