I've been thinking about a twist in how bots work here in STEEMIT, we all used bots at least once like booster, randowhale, minnowbooster, voter, etc.
This has been a really controversial topic around here, and in my newbie opinion this could be an issue, basically what this kind of bots do is to sell you votes in order to boost your posts, and the abuse of using bots is unbalancing the platform.
This kind of services have been increasing more and more with the passing time, and the fact that you have to buy for votes is not a good indicator of a fair community. But such as the guns are not evil by themselves, bots are the same, and the man problem is the abuse that people can make about it.
Here is an idea to help control the voting bots without removing them in order to make them more as a benefit than a problem.
Most of us, and most of the users on STEEMIT has a really low voting value, cents or even a fraction of a cent, and everybody knows how hard is to make it grow. This is a big problem when it comes to vote on a post or reward a really great article, you just read something you loved, you can see the hard work people have put on it and all you can give is $0.02. But as everybody knows you can give a vote from a bot as a gift to show some love to the author at least a bit more than what you can give.
It seems like everyone is using the bots for themselves and that's where this idea could fix that issue, what if the voting bots could have a pre set system where if you use the bot to yourself you are gonna be able to earn the money, but the reputation value will increase in order to that vote.
Let me try to explain it better, suppose I send $4 SBD to booster, and I will receive a vote worth about $7 and 0.250 reputation level (it will depend on your rep level how much it will add, or in this case subtract) That means I will get my $7 in the post but is was 57.000 my new level will be 56.750. I know this does not affect big accounts, but those big accounts are not abusing on bots, they don't need to, but for new users will be a good lesson to not abuse on this.
It will also encourage the community to help others even more and show the love with the bots, off course the use of them will be somehow less than now, and their only function will be as a gifts.
You can tell me this could encourage people to get alt accounts just to use this service and send bots with the alt account in order to get your own rep intact but to get the boosters anyway, but this will all be at the sight of everyone and at the their time they do it, it will be evident who owns that alt account.
This idea is to help control de voting bots abuse, and in the same way encourage people to send gifts to others if you want to reward an author with a bigger amount, and in the same way it will reenforce the manual voting and leave aside a bit the bots problems.
Open Source Contribution posted via Utopian.io