I have been a part of Steemit for only 11 days now. Though I love the concept and believe it can go far there are a few significant hurdles that I believe need to be addressed for that to happen. The main one I see is bots.

From my very first post on ‘introduceyourself’ it has been clear that this place is riddled with bots. I suppose that is expected. There is a lot of monetary value that can be gained by simply liking and commenting on posts – something any old monkey or bot could do. In fact, since there is no way to lose money here even a really simple bot could earn its creator some coin over a bit of time. A bot with a bit of smarts could go much further.

So why is this a problem? Can humans and bots not live peacefully together in the land of Steemit? I say not. Though there may be some special circumstances where bots are important and necessary part of running the system, they should not be actively involved with the community masquerading as humans. This is a place for people to connect and share with other people. Where genuinely unique and creative content earns the rewards it deserves. Money seeking bots do not contribute to that.

As bots get better and better they will also be better a deceiving us into their tricks, spam, and scams. If steemit is overrun by bots the people will lose trust in the system and leave. Though they will continue generating steem amongst themselves while we are gone no one will be willing to buy into it with real money and so it will become worthless.
The other problem with intelligent bots is that they can be used to shift public opinion. Either for subtle advertising or political agendas we are at risk of losing the uncensoreable and unbiased promises of the blockchain tech.

So what can be done?

Well what does the rest of the internet do? We have spam filters on our emails, and CAPTCHA gates on other online services so why not here? Fight bots with bot searching bots. As bots become more and more intelligent (and they certainly will with the advancement of AI) so will our bot fighting bots. This balances the power much more than is possible with AI bots versus humans.

Here are some of my thoughts on how this could be addressed;

• A ‘I’m not a Robot’ captcha built into the upvote button. Like the google version, this could monitor mouse and key movements behind the scenes and prevents votes if there is suspicious behaviour. This would need to be unobtrusive and easy to use so that most humans don’t even notice. The old style where you type in the distorted text wouldn’t be great.

• Bots designed to simply find and flag other bots.
• A time limit from the time the post is opened to the time an upvote or comment can be placed. This limit could be dependent on the length of the post. I have found that as soon a post is made there are several upvotes within seconds. These bots/people obviously didn’t have time to read the post and are clearly just after cheap curation rewards.
• A timer limit for upvotes and comments (may already be in place?) to prevent many upvotes in short periods of time.
• A limit to the number of times a link to a separate post is posted into the comments within a period of time. This should prevent bots/people spamming their content into other people’s posts.

I just wanted to clear up that I am not a programmer. I’m sure these things are a lot more complicated than what I’ve made out – especially on a blockchain. This is just me asking a genuine question of whether the system could be improved. Feel free to point out any flaws and issues.

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