4 Types of bots: Bid, Info, Curation, Community. (almost 5k followers!!!)

Hello Steemians,

I wanted to take a moment to broadly categorize 4 different types of bots that run on Steemit. You've seen these things interacting with people and the chain everyday, and I just wanted to give a good sense of what they do and categorize them to help you understand their role on Steemit.

What's a bot

A bot is an account that has an aspect of programming built into it. There's usually a program or some kind of interface that allows for things that happen daily or weekly to be done automatically by computer rather than done manually.

Bid Bot

The first kind of bot that most people would refer too I think would be a bid bot or a vote bot. These are pay2play (pay2spray in 1 case). You send SBD and a post URL in the memo and you can get a vote. They almost always net you more than you invested though there are times that the cost of the bid outweighs the rewards you earn. Most of them are using the Dr. Otto build by Hive account@inertia, but there's one prominent one out there that isn't.

Dr. Ottos- Hive account@booster, Hive account@bellyrub, Hive account@nettybot, Hive account@discordia, and Hive account@lovejuice are all examples of bidbots that run the Dr. Otto program.

Others- Hive account@minnowbooster and Hive account@randowhale are examples of bots that run a different system. Randowhale gives you a random percent boost. Hive account@minnowbooster isn't quite a bid so much as a cash for immediate vote thing. Hive account@minnowbooster also has delegation rental so there are additional features there to explore.

Infobot

There are a few bots that provide you with information on a daily basis. Hive account@curie's post are a good info one. While the manual action that they are really known for is curation there is a script that aggregates the posts they rewarded together and a list of the posts they supported is reported. That's info! You can also see Hive account@arcange has a daily hit parade bot that scours the block for the most voted and most commented posts and puts those together so folks can see what's hot. You get info.

Curation

Auto: There are bots that are out there that help with curation. At their worst they create circle jerks that drain the pool. At their best they create mechanisms to fund authors who post great content. Basically any account can become a curation bot just by adding steemvoter or autovoting programs on top. There are some opensource programs that allow for steem voting so you can pay for the steemvoter service or run your own. A great example of these can be found in the Minnow Support Project with Hive account@msp-creativebot, Hive account@muxxybot, and Hive account@sft. These are examples of bots that form specifically to help find and curate great content.

Cyborg: there are at least two examples of cyborg curation. Cyborg is a mix of person and machine. In this case Hive account@banjo and Hive account@minnowsupport are good examples (both programs were created by Hive account@inertia). They have community accounts that they attach to, but each vote is cast manually. So, the program allows people to use a communal account without the posting key, but every individual vote is cast manually by a person. So, they are cyborgs.

Community

The last kind of bot functions similarly to the curation bots, but the focus is less on great content and more on a community of authors and Steemit contributors. msp-lovebot, and Hive account@msp-shanehugs are good examples here. Folks that contribute to the community are rewarded with upvotes on their posts. Some of it is because they delegate to projects, some of it is because they work hard and contribute to the group.

MSP: A community hub for communities

In the coming weeks the Minnow Support Project is going to work with a variety of communities to financially support them as get started. There are blossoming African, Filipino, and Turkish communities to name a few, but there are a variety of concerns around them. One of the roles that the Minnow Support Project can play is to foster communities by acting as a neutral 3rd party with crystal clear guidelines and a track record of success and managed by trustworthy and publicly accountable elected Witnesses. We are also building tools to help automate aspects of this. When we're done we'll have the ability to automate this stuff and make it a breeze!

Be the curation you want to see in the world

I'll make a bigger rant about this later, but ultimately people (whales) really need to be the curation they want to see in this world. Essentially you have 2 choices. Support content and or support people. The Minnow Support Project does both and tries to lead by example of what good community and content curation can look like as a team project.

Yes, I'm going here

We do good shit! Please support us!

https://steemit.com/minnowsupportproject/@discordiant/delegation-tutorial-minnow-support-group-bots

And I hope this gives you some additional idea of what bots can do to help Steemit, you, content creators, and communities!