TLDR: If you are a real person please do not upvote or comment. Unless I asked you to
Bot Bait
I've only been on steemit for about a week, but one of my first ideas was to "build a bot" to up upvote content early, then sit back and watch it go. As I've been posting the last few days I've noticed that I'll get a few upvotes, and even comments within seconds of posting something. My strong suspicion is that because my steem power is public it is pretty easy to write a bot that will upvote anything I say. Flattering.
Experiment
Since it's harder to write bots that actually reads the content of a post, I'm also assuming that all I have to do to entice the bots is type out enough characters to appear to be a legit post, but not actually be a legit post. Though I do have one problem; a bot will likely want at least a few other upvote in order to pile in. So I'll ask a few friends to upvote this post just to get the ball rolling.
Now let's assume dear reader that you are not a bot, and you've heeded my call and not upvoted this post. What do you see? Are there vauge comments that could mean anything? Possibly even something that makes no sense at all? Maybe, and maybe not.
So What
So if steemit is filled with bots does it matter? I mean someone wrote them to act like normal people. So maybe they have some place in the ecosystem, but my hunch is they are just adding noise. Is there anything we can do about it? Probably not, so maybe we should just not believe everything we read.