@weenis seems to have shut down his bot army... for now.
Recently he posted an attempted bid war to try and get users to determine the future of his bots by asking for upvotes to the tune of $8000 (since has been removed) on his presented options:
Choices
https://steemit.com/steemit/@weenis/option-a-release-the-bots-release-details-on-over-20-custom-bots
https://steemit.com/steemit/@weenis/option-b-shut-them-down-destroy-the-custom-code
Original post
The communities response was quite harsh reacting not only with comments against his bots, but the bid war tactic he used against Steemit as a quasi-bribe. Although a bit misguided, he was tactful in the comments responding surprisingly politely to some pretty aggressive and at times rude remarks.
But what about his bots?
I have not seen him make any remarks about pulling the bots yet, but it appears they are offline now. For the last couple hours there has been no activity according to my own anti-spam bot @clamps and manually checking steemd seems to verify this.
And in the future?
We'll see if the @weenis bot family comes back, but it appears he is now aware of the large audience of users against his style of spam-bots (even if they are profitable). The message is clear to bot makers that brute-force tactics against the platform to try and gain minimal amounts from unsuspecting users is not very profitable in the long run. It might work briefly, but once your bot net is found out, it will be damn hard to get them off everyone's blacklists.
Bots are valuable, but only when they are written well and perform a service the community needs like fighting spam and plagiarism. And not just that, but exciting uses like @williambanks talking about supervising the training of bots with the public!
But you have to know a few things about NLP, and you have to squelch the bot when it has less than 98% probability of formulating a coherent response from it's ontological matrix. That means conceptual extraction and having a broad, deep and solid ontology which means letting the other humans train him. But for that, you have to supervise and own it if people call out your bots.
Bots are useful! When done RIGHT
Please don't hate the innocent bots out there trying to do work for the platform though. Bots like @clamps @cheetah and @antispam are trying to do their part to keep the platform clean and better curated. The future is bright, but it will take some time and quite a bit of effort to make it that way.