The imminent demise of comment bots.

So today Hive account@steemitblog released a what to expect when you're expecting a hardfork blog post. (They didn't title it that, which seems like a lost opportunity.)

If you get lost reading it, don't worry. I'm sure they had an intended audience for the post, but I'm not sure I can figure out what that audience was. It certainly wasn't regular users.

However, one thing caught my attention when they were talking about the transition to the new Resource Credit system, which is that certain operations which add a lot of data to the blockchain will be more expensive under RC than they have been under bandwidth, particularly posts and comments.

It looks to me like humans with existing accounts probably won't have much problem with this. There are some potential issues with the new 0 SP accounts having enough RCs to post/comment and earn SP to move beyond that, and we'll more or less have to wait to see how that will play out.

But the effect on comment bots should be immediately noticeable, particularly on those without very much SP to work with. Some of that's great - the phishing bot should be a lot less effective, spam should decrease, and bots that are purely annoying like the recent Hive account@bott which tells you if you have unclaimed rewards might go away completely.

Then there's the middle ground like the spellchecker, mentioning non-existent user checker, the Magic 8-Ball, Haiku Bot, things that many of us don't really find add much but some posters clearly see value in. It's pretty likely those are going to get wiped out by the change.

Also probably dead are the callable bots, which only show up when someone actually wants them. Bots like Hive account@rollsomedice, which despite its name rolls one six-sided die, and Hive account@rolld20 which rolls one 20-sided die, are useful services that have relied on cheap comments. Those are at the top of my mind because I'm slowly working on a more-full-featured callable dice and rng bot, because I've been frustrated at not having one. But part of why I'm not moving fast is I'm not sure how many SP it's going to need to be practicable under HF20.

There are quite a few communities who have their own callable bots for various purposes who should be thinking about what this means to them. If they're running on low-SP accounts they may stop functioning.

Don't worry, though, the bidbot comments aren't likely to go anywhere, since they have plenty of SP. Thankfully this also includes the most useful callable bot, Hive account@tipu. I imagine Cheetah will also be fine, and if 10,000 SP doesn't turn out to be enough for its comment volume there will be people to delegate to it.

Steemitboard of course is one that might have a real problem despite having significant SP, given their comment volume. The introduction bots might have issues as well, especially if we do see more new users coming with faster account creation.

I'm not really sure how this is going to shake out or whether Steem will be better or worse for it, but it's a pretty significant change that we haven't really thought about yet, so it seemed worth bringing up.