It would be a sad day if Steemit were destroyed by the likes of Methbot.
There are organisations hiring people to spend their days pretending to read content and then upvoting thousands of 'read' articles, supporting adverts, brands etc
There are also companies which run 'bots' or programs which, rather than running on computers infected with malware which includes the bot, run on a large array of distributed rented hardware, having hijacked hundreds of thousands of IP addresses, they produce fake video requests from news networks, emulate humans watching the content, utilising fake credentials and logins, with fake mouse-clicks and the whole 9 yards.
Methbot is a name given to a particular fraudulent ad voting network.
This new ad fraud system is an interesting development with tremendous impact on the future of existing modalities as it exploits weaknesses and design flaws in content voting systems in use by data collection systems which reward users for their opinions.
While these systems are rather dissimilar to Steemit, the elaborate design demonstrates how easy it might be to fraudulently exploit Steemit's curation system and generate really large returns for a range of fraudulent accounts.
What would make the accounts fraudulent is the simple fact that bots perform the tasks which humans would on an automated basis without any regard for the content upvoted and thereby exploit its security weakness.
Online fraud involving advertising exploits amount to well over $ Billion per year and the players spend big money maintaining the systems which automatically produce a truly incredible amount of Internet activity. In fact it seems that most Internet traffic is fake.
I believe we should take cognisance of this phenomenon and ensure that Steemit devotes extensive resources to avoiding these exploits which have the potential to destroy the best thing to ever come from the Internet.
Please read the source materials for an education on the subject so that your contribution may be an informed opinion.
Sources
Pixabay, Google Images