How does STEEM plan to combat bot accounts?
By introducing the Economic Improvement Proposal, which it did in Hard Fork 21 in August 2019.
The reward system was changed in the following ways:
- The split between the author and the curators of a post was changed to 50/50 from 75/25. Curators were incentivized by getting a bigger cut.
- Everyone got 2.5 free downvotes at 100% voting weight that didn’t draw from their daily voting power. It no longer cost anything to cast 2.5 100% power downvotes on posts that abused the reward pool or were overvalued.
- Any post worth less than about 20 STEEM worth of pending rewards would be valued slightly less than a linear estimate based on combined voting power used. The purpose of the partially sublinear reward curve was to curb low-level abuse that was hard to detect otherwise.
Also, the content reward pool was cut down by 10 percentage points, which were re-allocated to a Worker Proposal System where funding is distrubuted to project proposals in a stake-based voting process.
The reforms sparked a change in the culture dubbed #newsteem. The vote selling bot industry was wiped out in a matter of weeks because buying votes was made a financial losing proposition as it should’ve been all along because the idea that you could get paid to advertise something is insane. Quality content creators started to get rewarded much better than before because many former bid bots turned into active curation projects that would give out large votes for