I was wondering, who the fuck is voting for my spammy test posts?
I was, actually, just working on a simple votebot, that you can configure to work with more than one account, by feeding it parameters. Having thought about this a little further, I am starting to see why certain elements of the methods of working with the platform are not being documented, even if they are there to use. I am actually suspending my work on this for the time being, and returning to my own focus, after figuring out a few things about the mindset around here.
As a consequence, and despite the seeming limitations, I intend fully to live up to the name I have adopted here. Loki, from the original Eddas, was a character who grated with everyone, and stirred up trouble everywhere. It is amusing to me that right in the midst of what is itself a disruption of the world around, there is many people who react very badly to potential disruptions to this disruption in their midst. Well, too bad for those people. Steem dies without further development.
Like it or not, there is going to be changes. I am going to spill the beans, and show the new people how to disrupt this system and make it grow further. I am not going to win any friends from the established community, except for the small number who actually understand that disruption is essential to life, and to the future of Steem, and the entire crypto-sphere as a whole.
Я согласен с вами. Если большинство участников будет рассматривать этот проект только как способ заработка, они неизбежно будут обращаться к помощи ботов и это убьет проект. Я бы предложил разработчикам проекта использовать ваш опыт публикации нелепых сообщений, чтобы отфильтровать ботов и понижать за их использование SP аккаунтов. Так же как действует на пост downvote.
spacibo za kommentara...
ok, i apologise for my dreadful attempt at russian. I translated it with google translate. I can almost phonetically read russian because I know a fair bit of bulgarian, but I'll leave that aside for a moment.
Regarding the issue of bots. I don't think that there is any way to get rid of them. There is no human force acting in this place with the power to do this. There is no moderators, only the collective action of the participants. Moderators are trusted third parties and indeed, their performance makes or breaks the community as a whole.
It is a stated objective of the Steem project, to attempt to empower the users themselves to act as the gatekeepers for this kind of behaviour, as well as altering the algorithms to eliminate the opportunities for automated gaming of the scores and votes to benefit their operators.
In fact, I made these posts because I was testing a python script that tunes into the stream of new posts and then automatically votes on some prescribed user or users who might appear in the stream. I was working, for a little while, with a very irritable german I bumped into in the #dev chatroom.
Anyway, no matter. I am not so interested in automation, personally, my focus is more about better interfaces and expanding and personalising the filters for users. I think that it won't be too long before there is no real money in running bots anyway. It is intended by the design to aim toward eliminating these kinds of methods of exploitation. However, having said that, there is tasks that can be automated, they just won't be ones that are profitable, maybe just enhance the comfort and pleasure of users. That's what I am most interested to put into the applications I want to build.