Why I Hate Bots
The Case Against The Cheetah Bot
Bots like @cheetah can be grossly abusive. I call your attention to @amnlive
AMN is Al Masdar News, a news organisation based in Beirut, Lebanon and dedicated to covering the MENA area (Middle East and North Africa). The @amnlive account is used to mirror the news stories from their site to Steemit, for those of us who have a particular interest in news of the MENA area.
The cheetah bot downvotes every single story posted by @amnlive. Given that the cheetah bot has a reputation of 75, this is devastating.
I have spoken to the individual who represents Al Masdar News here on Steemit, and asked if he/she had pursued the appeals process, and the answer was revealing. He/she said that the cheetah bot admins had requested documentation from AMN to verify their identity, but that AMN's legal department had vetoed that idea because they have no way to know who is behind the cheetah bot.
Remember Serena Shim
Now stop and think about the part of the world in which AMN is based. The MENA region is one in which journalists are killed for writing things that someone finds disagreeable. The current furor over Khashoggi's murder is the best known example, but the murder of Lebanese-American journalist Serena Shim by Turkish intelligence, because she revealed their supply of weapons to Daesh/ISIS is another good example.
Adding Insult To Injury, @mack-bot Piles On
So the cheetah bot continues to downvote every single thing posted by @amnlive, and recently it has been joined in that campaign of harassment by something called mack-bot. The combined effect of these two is to render @amnlive almost invisible. And to add insult to injury, cheetah bot also posts a reply accusing @amnlive of being "a known plagiarist, spammer or ID thief.", again on every single thing posted by @amnlive.
From what I have seen after following AMN for several months now, they are guilty of none of these. They are always very careful to attribute any stories which are aggregated from other sources, such as Ruptly.
So while it may perhaps be true that the cheetah bot has done good work on other fronts, in this particular instance its behaviour is abusive, unfair harassment, and the appeals process has utterly failed.
Summary
It seems to me a very great moral wrong that a piece of software should have that kind of veto power over a living, breathing human being. That is the stuff of Orwellian nightmares.
And that, my friends, is why I am utterly opposed to all use of bots on Steemit. I would gladly see them all banned.
(The image at the top of this blurb is certainly not my own, and was shamelessly borrowed from an excellent article by Noah Berlatsky in Escapist magazine, see https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/2019/01/04/the-terminator-will-always-be-back/)
@cheetah is not the only bot that hates duplicate content. The googlebot despises duplicate content. Googlebot penalizes sites with mirrored content.
Since SteemIt has more inbound links to most sites. Google will automatically assume that it is the canonical source for your web content.
SteemIt articles show up on a large number of interfaces. So this thread is on SteemIt, Busy and numerous other sites.
https://busy.org/ai/@redpossum/why-i-hate-bots
Googlebot, and other webcrawlers, see this as a content mill. They will give demerits to all of the sites that have the duplicate content.
Mirroring your web site on SteemIt has the potential of completely removing your web from Google and other search engines.
Mirroring your site on SteemIt is a silly, silly idea that can destroy a site.
The best solution for content creators is to use SteemIt as an indexing service.
That is one should write a short paraphrased article on SteemIt with a link to the full article on one's independent site.
The structure where you paraphrase an article on SteemIt and link to your content makes it clear that your web site is the authoritative source for the information.
Rather than getting mad at @cheetah, I think people should rethink their decision of mirroring content on SteemIt.
That is some useful information, thank you for replying.
I don't have an ongoing dialogue with AMN. I'm just someone who enjoys their content, and I felt outrage at seeing them slandered by a %^&$#* bot.
The truth is, I have an ongoing hatred for bots in all forms. In factories and so many other places, they are the death of the working class. The only leverage we have ever had was the fact that the ruling class needed our labour. This is the meaning of the phrase "workers control the means of production". The introduction of robots to replace us in so many jobs is the end of that, and with it the last nail in the coffin of any hope of social justice. When the bosses no longer need us, we will have been reduced to irrelevance, and from there it is only one short step to annihilation.
If you think I'm paranoid when I say "annihilation", consider the Zika epidemic which struck Brazil in 2015. Genetically modified Aedes mosquitoes were introduced into the area by a British firm called Oxitech in 2014, supposedly to combat Zika, but instead a minor problem affecting a few remote villages became a sweeping epidemic affecting multiple nations. But we are told there was no connection. Granted, coincidence does not necessarily imply causation, but common sense tells us that was not an accident. Consider some of the public comments by Bill Gates about the use of GM mosquitoes for "population control" in Africa, and tell me he's not advocating eugenics.
The word "Luddite" is used to discredit anyone who speaks as I do, but the Luddites are much misunderstood. Ned Lud and his followers were not blindly anti-technology, per se, they simply objected to the loss of their jobs, and with them their ability to feed their children, their very means of survival.
I dislike bots as well.
Unfortunately, the net is awash in bots that attack and mislead people on the net. The only way to counter the bots that are attacking the net is with defensive bots.
Spam is generated by bots. Viruses are bots.
Search engines are generated by bots.
There are numerous bots that harvest and republish content on the net.
I mentioned busy.org. Busy.org is a huge site that republishes posts from SteemIt.com. To an extent, busy.org could be described as a "bot." It is a server that republishes information from SteemIt.com.
Creating a bot is easy.
People often behave like bots. That's the idea behind memes. A graphic artist creates a provocative graphic and a huge number of people reblog the graphic.
We can't get rid of bots; so we have to talk about what they do and we need to figure out how to deal with issues related to bots.
As @cheetah and steemcleaners are trying to use bots to counter other bots, they are an interesting structure.
A couple things here that you address, but don't think you understand. The account is believed to be content theft, not legit mirrored content. Honestly knowing how most news networks work there is little chance they would be so stupid as to post full articles on steemit when they survive on traffic to their site. Without traffic numbers that they can track they can't sell ads or see which authors are producing content that readers want to see. I would agree this account is stealing content and in no way legit.
Someone else mentioned the Google issue about duplicate content and this alone would stop any legit website from wanting their content posted on steemit, again added proof this is a content theft issue.
As for bots, well they are very much needed. I use them all the time to autovote people that I want to support daily. There are all sorts of useful bots out there and cheetah is one of them IMO. They are very important and needed on steemit due to the amount of content theft that happens.
Side note I support steemflagrewards and there have been multiple attempts to let this plagiarist clear his name and he refuses to do any of them. There is zero chance he has authorization to be posting that content IMO.
Heya, Darkhorse, thanks for the reply!
I hear what you're saying, but if you look at the account in question now, he has changed his practices since I posted this, and is now posting a summary with links to the full story on the AMN website.
In any case, I just now used the contact form on the AMN site to ask them directly if this content is being reposted with their authorisation. If they reply, I will let you know, one way or another, even if they confirm your suspicions and I wind up looking like a total fool :)
If this account is really AMN's official account, they could just add link to steem account on their website.
No one have power over other users. It's blockchain, you can't be muted, banned, censored. You can get downvotes, but power of downvotes is based on Stake that downvoter have. Just buy more SP and counter their flags. And Cheetah is not just software, there is team if People behind it (same team as behing @steemcleaners, @spaminator, @mack-bot, @mack-botjr... Bots are operated by @anyx (top 20 witness) and @patrice (top 40 witness) and the rest of the team. Steemit INC is delegating SP (via @misterdelegation).
Posted using Partiko Android
Thank you for your reply
Interesting choice of topic @redpossum. Definetly good as a click-bait :)
I personally hate the fact that there is no "customer service" that should come along with those bots.
Good interesting read.
Cheers
Piotr
"click bait"? Me? Oh, Piotr, how could you suspect little old me of such a nefarious practice?
(wink)
In all fairness, cheetah does have an appeals process, but it doesn't make allowances for the fact that people in some parts of the world may be placing their very lives in danger by identifying their RL selves.
I was running a fever when I wrote the article above, (I'm still not over the flu. It's wretched), and I may perhaps have gotten a bit overzealous...
hahahaha @redpossum :) is there anything wrong with clickbait title? it simply means that it's a good title :)
the problem with clickbaits is that good title not always go along with good article. in your case it did.
He should have online full time customer service. That's the truth. And should have official informations provided about himself. Otherwise he is nothing more than local warlord on steemit.
Please get back to health soon. Drink water, sleep and cuddle with someone you love :)
Piotr