The Bot Problem

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#blockchain

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2017-07-12 16:36

The good, the bad, and the ugly

It's "not so good" It's not so good that there are users who own 20+ bot accounts
and that the platform enables good bots to each gain +20 reputation points in 3 days. Going from 25 to 45 takes away and thins out community.

I came here ten days ago and soon started exploring the blockchain and now run a blockchain info bot that you can query for any steemers reputation (down to the comma), what percentage of users have lower reputation than that steemers, which followers you share and so on. Being able to answer anyone on command, anywhere, means you want to stream all content that's been generated on the site.

What steemit looks like on my laptop.
On the very right, I check if the expression "I " is part of the text.

You take each post and analyze it for the content. In my case, when it's "@"
followed by a username, I give you info about that user. This is very specific.
What you could also do is scan if the post contains the word "bitcoin" or
"ethereum" or "litecoin", etc., and response with "X to the moon", where
you replace X with whatever is talked about. What you can also do is scan if the
comment contains the word "love" and as well as the word "cat", and reply with
"this cat is beautiful". Or do the same with something sports related.
You get the drill.

I don't wanna point fingers, and the, ethics of this aren't trivial, but consider this users who posts for 10 hours straight every day and seems to be very fond of coins and helicopters. What I find sad and a bit distressing is the hundreds of people who engage in conversations with the bot.

Now take my friend and tutor @lynor. He came here and made a quite elaborate and unseen first post on a usecase for the Raspberry Pi computer. I upvoted him, but that was about it. A week later, he got a random bot post and this post was in turn upvoted by 20 other bots. Nice money share...