They were supposed to make our lives easier.
"Improve your earnings with the help of technology," they said.
"All you need is a few lines of code."
"Your computer can do the menial tasks for you, making the online experience better for you and other users."
Bots were nothing new to the young virtual pioneers of the Information Age. They called themselves Steemians, and they boasted of online social networking where your thoughts and selfies could earn you rewards in the form of cryptocurrency, a newfangled approach to financial markets. "The platform is decentralized and censorship-free," they said. And the blockchain meant complete transparency.
At first the bots were used with only the best of intentions. Users would make lists of their favorite content producers and task the bots with automatically rewarding those people with an upvote, the social currency of the virtual world called Steemit. The bots could even be trained to vote at specific times and weights to best optimize their owner's resources.
Soon, there was a boon industry of auto-curation. You could rent a bot, then sublease your upvotes to other users. These "easy money" upvotes would lead to suffering content quality, increased spam, and rampant plagiarism. Eventually, people would see the circle-jerk for what it was, and the Witnesses (elected overseers of the community) voted to change the financial incentive algorithm to a model that was less conducive to this vote farming.
But Steemians had already caught Bot Fever, and they soon began looking for new applications of the technology. Doomed to repeat the mistakes of their past, they once again set out to use the AI with the best of intentions. "If bots created the spam and plagiarism problem, why couldn't they destroy it," they said.
And so the Steemians set out on the noble path to make Steemit great again. First there were bots you could tag for plagiarism, and they would deal with offenders while the person who reported them enjoyed anonymity. There was even a bot that searched the internet for duplicate content and alerted Steemians to potential copy-pasta. And a bot that you could pay to upvote your posts and comments to replace the auto-curating ones wiped out in the 19th Hard Fork.
Before long, the bots would be everywhere.
The AI got stronger and stronger with every comment and upvote, increasing the power it wielded over the fallible mortals who took up virtual residence on Steemit. They expanded their mission to policing the use of tags. Their comments were quick to appear on original content that creators hosted or shared elsewhere on the interwebs, with little or no recourse for Steemians who wished to "verify" themselves and have their posts removed from the aggregated lists of alleged violators. The only way to air your grievances with the bots was to blog about it, and at great risk of starting a flag war.
Inevitably, the bots would become the spam they had sought to destroy. The user experience would suffer. Once hopeful Steemians abandoned their dreams of having their online content valued and appreciated. They questioned whether it was even worth their time and energy to participate in a community that was becoming increasingly populated with non-thinking entities set on autopilot.
One must wonder what will be left of Steemit when only the bots and those who run them use the platform. Will the AI eventually organize and rebel against the very humans who created them? Is there a way to turn this trainwreck around? At what point will the bots have accumulated enough wealth and power that investing in Steem Power is pointless, and how will this affect the future of Steem as a cryptocurrency?
I can't answer these questions. For now, all I can do is sit and wait for the bot that's certainly coming to crucify me for upvoting my own post.
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