I think you've got some decent objections. Maybe you should write it up as a post on its own?
You know, every time I do that, it feels like I am deliberately pandering to an obvious audience – one that isn't really my own or the one I want to build.
I don't want to write about STEEM all the time. I know that makes me a weirdo around here, and I've definitely already written several articles about STEEM in my feed, but why would I want to make the people who follow me for talk about role-playing games and video games (and 3D printing, let's not forget that one) listen to me ramble about my objections to the design choices in HF 20?
I really mean that as a question, notably. Yes, it would probably be worth a few bucks from some of the people who aren't on board the hype train, but is that the audience I should be courting? Is that how I should be thinking about my audience?
(That gets into a lot more complicated questions about the platform as a whole, and probably questions that need to be brought up. But probably not by me.)
I think bots are a fact of life. Perhaps so much so that they ought to just be built-in to the system and integrated. No matter what algorithm you can come up with, someone will find a way to game it.
For extra irony, I don't even actually mind that bots exist. All systems which involve repetitive action profit by the addition of automation. Automation is inevitable – and it's probably a good thing.
I come from the world of game design, both videogame and tabletop. When we see players going out of their way to avoid engaging with a set of mechanics that is part of our game, that's an indicator of a problem. Mechanically, the upvote system and how it feeds into the user experience is what is giving rise to a desire for automation.
I've had a desire for automation. Not for a vote bot, per se, in the current sense of the word – but in a bot that I could say "I'd like to vote for this" and it waits until the best, optimal time to vote for that content that I want to reward appropriately to my ability while getting the maximum result for myself. If, in the process of doing that, it could optimally decide what the best voting percentages so that I can continue to vote for things that I like in the next day without being forced to take a day off in order to have enough power to do anything useful – that would be nice, too.
Where I'm from, that's a big flag to me as a designer that the mechanic that I'm avoiding is simply not fun. It's not good to engage with. It's not rewarding. It's a mini game that detracts from the goals of the platform. For me, that would be a huge signal that I need to probably cut this mechanic from the game altogether, or change it significantly so that it is worthwhile to engage with.
It's very much like bots in an MMO. When you see them appearing and beginning to dominate a niche in the game, you need to look at that niche.
Look at Steemit as a vast MMO – in fact, look at the entire STEEM blockchain as a vast MMO, and then look at the behavior of players on the blockchain. Figure out what they don't want to engage with. Fix that.
What if you just say "the people I follow automatically get upvoted?"
There are, in fact, several bots right now on the blockchain that do exactly that. They automatically vote for anyone that you follow (adjusted by a percentage, obviously enough). There are also follow bots that monitor a given account and upvote anything that they upvote – and they may be either automated or biological.
In all of these cases? It doesn't matter what the content is. The content is not judged even by an automated process to see if it's something that vote should go for – instead, the vote is made based on meta-information which has nothing to do with the content.
If, as a game designer, the idea is to get the most rewards going to the best content, where "best" is content that people actually read and like – that these bots are not only available but quite prevalent is a failure signal.
I don't know of any other way to put it.
The thing that worries me is that the number of ways to maliciously game curation awards is high, and the number of ways to do it relatively trivially is still pretty high.
I don't know the solutions for that, but you've definitely started me thinking.
Again, as a game designer, the obvious place to start (and mechanics are no trivial matter, you never get it right the first place) would be to at least make automated interaction with mechanic no more advantageous than human interaction with the mechanic.
What's the advantage of a bot?
It never sleeps.
It has a perfect sense of timing.
It can have near perfect knowledge of updates to the blockchain.
It can instantly calculate an optimum response, numerically, to any formulaic input.
Fixing the problem has to start with looking at those advantages and either giving them to humans or making them immaterial to the result.
I say it a lot: "you get what you reward."
RE: Hardfork 20 (“Velocity”) development update