It seems there's a new evil genius at large on Steemit - and he's got himself an army of bots.
If you take a look at the new page right now, you'll notice about one in every 20 posts receiving a torrent of upvotes within one or two minutes of posting.
When this happened to two of my posts yesterday, I was initially excited. After all, it looked as though my post had gone viral almost immediately. However, I quickly realised that these votes counted for nothing except numbers, having failed to increase my payout by a single cent. Bots were clearly afoot.
Given that both of my posts that this happened to were about completely different things, it doesn't seem as though the bots were being targeted at specific keywords, which is still the case with the activity that's happening now. It also doesn't seem like there's any particular preference for new or experienced authors. Unless there's some deeper method he's using to select worthy recipients, it seems this benevolent madman is choosing posts at random.
Now, you might ask why I'm complaining. Surely having more votes on a post is a good thing? Personally, I feel that feedback on Steemit should come from human beings, and that bots are definitely not the way to achieve our end goal of a healthy, mutually supportive network. Of course, if the bots were actually bestowing money with their votes, they might be a useful tool for whales to promote authors up the ranks - but perhaps still not an honest one. And at the end of the day, chances are their only purpose is to generate curation rewards without actually contributing anything, which is becoming a growing trend that people don't seem to like. Also the more people become aware of this happening, the more 'contaminated' botvoted posts become - people are less willing to upvote them any further, even if they are valuable.
Here's an image of what I think is the full list of bots (apologies if there are any humans in there) if anyone (
