Recently, I noticed that growth of followers is no longer organic. On 16-05-2018, I had just 666 followers, and right now as I am writing this post, my followers have increased by almost hundred. It feels odd, I have been on steemit since about 10 months now, I have never experienced this kind of artificial following.
Followers as at 16-05-2018
Today
I thought this place was created for human-to-human interaction, not for bloodless followers, it takes the fun out of the equation. At a point, I observe that 30% of the entire 1,000,000 steemit may belong to bots. This ain't cool!
Don't be surprised if 50% of your followers are not human, so I smile when people complain that they are getting low engagement on their blogs. How can bots engage human like humans? It is difficult.
Quantity Vs. Quality
Wouldn't you prefer a few loyal followers than a handful of bots? Bots are part of the reasons why steemit will not achieve mass adoption so quick. If you have several bots following you, value of your account is reduced irrespective of your reputation or steem power.
How Did I Know That These New Followers Are Bots?
Lately, when I make a post, I gain about 10 followers in 20 seconds. This is unrealistic, how can human reach a conclusion to follow a user in 20 seconds, by reading post which takes 6 minutes to read? Only bots can do it.
Also, I took my time to check on these accounts, many do not have a single post, yet, they have several followers and are following several accounts too. All these bots do have same reputation (25 or 26) and they were created in January, 2018.