Vilifying Bots

In my last post I gave notice to bot spammers that we will take actions to mitigate the abuse and keep Steemit a place that people can enjoy participating in.

User Hive account@williambanks responded with an insightful article. I was going to reply to him in the comments, but thought that it deserved a full post.

I will summarize my primary take aways:

1. Don’t vilify Bots, there are real people behind them
2. For many people this is a “game” to make money while they can
3. For other people this is an “investment” to make a lot of money long term
4. Incentives create the bot situation

I saw several proposed solutions:

1. Restrict access to web socket api
2. Remove stake-weighted voting (use hot rather than trending)
3. Help people improve their bots

Here are the primary things that william was missing:

1. Sybil attacks - bot operators are already doing this by creating a large number of accounts and vote spamming
2. Evil People - these people wish to do as much harm as possible because they enjoy hurting others
3. Stupid People - these people harm others while getting no benefit for themselves

Strong Reputation and Identity

The only solutions to Sybil are Reputation, Identity, and Stake Weighted voting. Once we solve the identity / reputation issue then it becomes much harder to create dummy accounts.

Conclusion

I have a ton of respect for the stance william made and will certainly attempt to incorporate what I can from it into the solutions we deploy. Nothing in life is ever as easy as it seems, and william’s proposed solutions would be at most a short term issue.

There are people who are motivated to act in ways that break other peoples toys just because it is fun.