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