Bot's are Destroying Steemit?
When Seemit first started it was full of enthusiastic users, everyone was yearning to read posts and write them. Then a time came where some people were "too excited" and decided to start plagiarising posts and stealing content because of laziness.
The Birth of Cheetah
The plagiarizing crisis got way too out of hand, and a bot was created to counter the stolen content. Cheetah would find posts and do a plagiarism check on them and then posts a comment with the link to where the content was taken from.
Cheetah has been doing a very well job at finding these people and exposing them; other users begin to flag them to ensure their post is not seen so they cannot make money from it. Many people make claims Cheetah is flagging their posts, but she does not flag, although other users are the ones who flag the copied posts.
The Bots who Make it a Better Place
When a new person signs up on Steemit, there is a bot who comments on their introduce yourself post to greet them. This first comment and up-vote are a great encouragement for the first time user, I remember seeing that comment on my first post, and it made me so happy.
Another bot that has helped the community a great deal is the Steemcleaners bot. The steam cleaners bot goes around and finds users who are scamming others, impersonating whales, and overall posting inappropriate things. I know some of you are thinking, "but I figured we could post anything, it's decentralized," well just because it is decentralized does not mean you can post photos of nude children.
A couple of weeks ago I made a post about the dark side of Steemit and went through the negative reputation accounts. Amongst all the disturbing things I had found some of them were very unacceptable, some users would post videos of deaths, nude children, scamming and causing FUD. I was in total shock finding this out; my first reaction was who is going to find all of this throughout the platform.
You can't go and hire someone to find all of the killing and nude pictures; no one wants to see that type of stuff. Once I looked at the comments, I would see the bots saying why they removed the post and picture; this made me so happy. I was glad to find out that these bots find the filthy content out there, so none of us get to see it.
I have seen many users complaining about the steem cleaners and cheetah, but they do not know the hard work that goes on in the background to ensure you don't get exposed to these types of content.
The Bad Bots
Just like the movie series Transformers, there are good bots and bad ones similar to Autobots and Decepticons. We need to depict the two and not blame every bot for the destruction of Steemit. Some users create spam bots that go around and spam post random stuff to up-vote themselves to farm STEEM.
I have seen some people create hundreds of bot accounts and ask for payment to upvotes authors content with their bots, so it seems like people are reading their content. The issue with these mass up-vote bots is that random posts will reach the "hot" or "trending" section because of the fast outburst of up-votes.
When these random posts go trending it throws the rest of the minnows posts under the bus, and it becomes very demeaning for them to bother posting in the future. All of the bots are 25 RP, and their voting power is almost 0, so their up-votes are worth nothing and don't benefit the user aside from looking good.
What We Can Do
I think if the steam cleaners get a task of finding these spambot accounts being created and remove them would prove to be difficult. The best method would be to make the account creation a bit more thorough; this can slow down the bot creation. The drawback of making signing up somewhat more challenging is new users may feel intimidated being asked a list of questions and verifications.
The only solution I can think of is blocking bots so they cannot up-vote or comment. If the steam cleaners can get the ability to find the active spam bots and start blocking and muting them, this can lower the number of bots.
The Issue With Steemit
The biggest problem everyone has with bots is that everything feels automated and unnatural. Seeing bots everywhere auto voting, commenting and spamming users becomes annoying, and it starts to feel like there are no real users left.
My personal opinion is, the good bots should stay because of the great work they do. Flagging inappropriate posts and scammers has helped the community hundreds of fold. Thanks to those bots we do not need to see the filth. Although since bots are becoming more and more across the platform, we see an uproar of bad ones also.
Homework For You!
In the comment section below I would like all of you to discuss what solutions you think would work to help the Steemit community to clean out the bad bots and spammers. Give your opinion if you believe that we should keep those bots or hunt them down.
If you enjoyed this post, please follow me for more and upvote!
My only issue is cheetah keeps finding my content on other sites lol and once you click on the link you see that its my article published on other sites. Usually on my own website. It can be a bit annoying seeing cheetah pop up on my posts but even more so if it would cause someone to flag my posts.
I am assuming cheetah can't tell who the author is when they post my articles on my posts, its not that sophisticated, right?
Keep in mind that the initial purpose of cheetah is simply to point out that "duplicate content exists." When you get a cheetah message, it's usually enough to simply respond with a "thank you cheetah, that's the original version on my own web site." Such a response will immediately tell not only cheetah, but also other readers of your post, that you're "above board" and not a plagiarizer.
Cheetah will sometimes do a manual followup and ask you to "prove ownership" of the original, which can typically be done by putting a link to your Steemit profile on your web site or Facebook page.
If you have concerns, I'd recommend you also follow @anyx, who's one of our witnesses and who operates both cheetah and steemcleaners.
Great, thank you for taking the time to reply to my comment. What I have done a few times to avoid that is writing my article here first, so that it's fresh and not available on my site or any other publications. The only issue I am having with that is when I go to transfer the content to my website its not transfering correctly and then includes some html that I have trouble fixing. So what I am thinking of doing is just writing them on google docs which is what I used to do.. and then transfer it here and then on my website but with the amount of pictures, videos, etc that I add to some of my articles it takes a long time. I will try to remember to reply to cheetah whenever I see them lol which is a cute name btw lol. Thanks again for your feedback.
I would like to start with applauding you for your posts, I have seen them and my god the amount of work you put into them and research blow my mind away. They have so much information all organized with images, I could never write something at that caliber.
Lol, so Cheetah cannot tell if the content on other website is your or not. Just like when you use the website "Turnitin" for checking for plagiarism, you can put an article through and you will get 100% plagiarized because it can't tell if its yours or not. It is the same with Cheetah, it considered the post copied if theirs more than one.
So what Cheetah recommends is commenting back letting it know that this post belongs to you and you own both. I have seen your replies back to Cheetah also, so your already doing that ahah i would say just keep it up.
Aww.. that's very kind of you to say! Thank you :-)
Ah okay I wasn't sure if I should be replying back to cheetah or not lol but I figured it would be good for others to see that it is my content loool. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond and will follow you so that I can learn more about the intricate ins and outs of steemit :-) Thank you again.
Your welcome! Hahah thank you for following me, I followed you as well! I already know your going to have an amazing article about the upcoming vote on the 25th about the Kurdish independence, can't wait to see your opinion! :)
Ah yesss... lol I have been posting quite a bit about this on all of my social media accounts. You look familiar so I am not sure if you already follow me on twitter (sarahabed84) Instagram (sabed84), or Facebook (Sarah Abed) but out of the three I would say I post the most on Facebook but I do try to post the same content when possible on the other social media platforms too. Monday will certainly be an interesting day. Some Kurds even burnt their Iraqi id cards already believe it or not lol. The next few days should be interesting too.. I think Barzani had told Baghdad that if they didn't come up with an alternative within three days that he was going to go ahead with the scheduled referendum on the 25 and I think today would have been day 3... we're gonna need to make some popcorn lol
Ahah I may look typical middle eastern 😂, I'll definitely follow your social medias! My biggest fear is the after math if they do separate, it's going to be an all out war there 😱. I'm actually a Turkmani Iraqi hahah so I know how crazy it's going to get there.
Oh and I just took a look at your posts and there are a bunch that I want to read. Lots of great topics. Keep up the great work! I will try to get to them this weekend.
I hope you enjoy them, I'm not that good at writing yet, been only 3 weeks practicing. I love some honest feedback on how to improve! 😊
Thanks for the information about "turnitin" web. In the spanish community we have @lince a project against plagiarism in @cervantes Witness
Even this is a decentralized community, there should be a group that will immediately remove unwanted bots and users. This should be delegated to the witnesses we are voting. To improve quality of the community and also guard the integrity of original contents. Much like what is happening on YouTube right now, suspend and ban violators right away! Upvoted and resteemed!
I agree with this guy, sounds like a good plan
yes the Witness should have the privilege of removing bots. There are many tools available online for free and for a company like steemit they should have their own botfinder.
I agree, it should be easy for the developers to implement, the question is why are they not willing to do it. In fact, as I notice encouraging the use of it...
Bots should only be coming from or should get through first from the developers and not just from anybody...
I agree 100%, the witnesses need to take care of it. They get compensation for being a witness, so its only fair for them to do their fair share of hard work. The only thing I can think of keeping bots for is removing the nudity pictures of children, I personally do not want to see those pictures, even for baning users. Maybe bots can keep tasks like those.
"Policing" Bots should be allowed.
I agree. Bots should be audited regularly by both developers and witnesses.
Much to our disappointment it is not happening right now, that is why a lot of bad bots are going berserk all over steemit community... There should be something done to regulate it.
Thanks for this really helpful article. Personally I think it will be hard to eliminate bad bots, but if there is a chance to do so I would fully support this.
I agree it will be hard but it will get harder when steemit gets more mainstream so if action is taken now it will be easier :)
You are absolutely right
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Thank you!!
Thank you for the well thought out post.
You're very welcome! :D
It's not bots we should be going after, it's people!
I'll keep it sweet and short. This platform thrives only on the merit of its users. Each of us should be personally responsible for tracking out low quality, plagiarised and unethically awarded content.
Its the shitty people behind the shitty bots that need to go.
I think if Steemit puts a minimum of 100 STEEM investment to activate an account this will stop useless people posting. It's a growing community and If we don't do something now it will be harder when theres a million users,
Something like this could work
That is a really great idea! I`m pretty sure that would solve the problem.
a 1 STEEM investment would pretty much stop it.
Yea, im sure the bots wont even bother putting in 1 STEEM so that should suffice haah.
Why can't bots also have a "ranking?" I would like to see a bot kill switch so I could turn off or select only the bots that I find beneficial to me and the community. A " Bot Zapper" would be fun!
Haha, that gave me an idea of what if we create a terminator bot that goes around and kills the bad ones. It would be nice for users to be able to deal with the bots first hand.
I don't like the idea of bots. I know they help and can do positive things for the Steemit community, but... it all feels to Big Brother to me. As time goes on, the line between the good and bad bots will blur, as do all lines. There is a reason I live off-grid, back in the woods. Heck I don't even on a cell phone, never have.
It's my dream to go off grid :). I agree, it feels so weird having the platform infested with bots. It feels like a filler.
It explains a bit more about bots to me..thanks
Your welcome :)