I have a rather simplistic solution for acceptable bot behavior as to making comments, which is the most annoying form of bot spam. Now, there is nothing that forces a bot writer to conform to this, but i think a lot of bot writers want to know what the rules are and if they know what is and isnt acceptable, it will at least keep the honest bot writers from being downvoted.
The idea is that if a bot follows these rules, the community wont downvote it into invisibility so by following the rules, it is better for the bot writer. The author of the bot would be able to describe his bot's functions as appropriate with additional posts, but that is subject to posting conventions.
I propose the following for an acceptable bot comment behavior:
- introduceyourself post is made on behalf of the bot that describes what it does and how to invoke it
- bot follows what is described and only generates comments when invoked by a user via
- spoofing a user request so as to be able to post a comment is not allowed, ie. "bot" would include any and all bots that are interacting
- bots that conform to this wont be downvoted by community and if the response is useful it is nice to give an upvote
For example, there is the isaac.asimov bot that posts about reading levels, which is annoying when it is done on every post. However, I could see how it could be useful for some people some of the time. So proper behavior is for isaac.asimov to monitor posts and if and only if it sees would it post a comment.
Now parsing posts is not so hard if you are just looking for "", but to do anything more complex could be an issue, so whether a bot can take additional parameters or not would be described in the introduceyourself.
Based on this, we will get a set of useful bots that need to compete on the functionality they offer, ie. bots that dont do anything useful wont ever be invoked. Also to show appreciation for the bot, if the answer they give when invoked was useful, upvote it. This way the bot writer's have a clear path to revenue, eg. make a useful bot and its responses will get upvoted.
Let me know what you think about this proposal or just upvote it if you like it.
James
crypto777 is my witness account #37 on https://steemit.com/~witnesses