Bots. Bots bots bots. The one I think that is the worst is of course the broken cheetah bot. But the other ones that are meant to have good purpose like automatic upvoting of posts, those are the second worse, but still all bad imo.
I wish people would get off auto curation of anything on Steemit, it makes things look odd when views, comments, and votes, seem to have no reality with each other.
Views has been broken since the start thought, I see my Steemit traffic views through other sources, like clicks to posts coming from Twitter, and can say views don't match the numbers I see just from that. They should have it turned off from unique views and have it set to just hit a number every page hit or something.
Thank you! Why go to such an extent as to create a voting bot? Whom and how does voting on an entry might benefits?
I believe these auto curation things are put in place with good intentions. I can't say for sure because I use none of them, but I can see SteemD and see who even votes on my own posts, and I know those users are not online 24 hours a day, but I do see real life users using those accounts at some time. I think the worst of it though is the cheetah bot, at the least the autocuration bots that people seem to use are doing positive work of upvoting and maybe distributing wealth, but the ones with negative outcomes for users seems like they should be stopped right away, especially since the cheetah bot has so many false positives on peoples posts and then auto votes up it's own comments.
Someone is getting rich from that bot https://steemit.com/cheetah/@tsxbox/my-curiosity-and-detective-work-on-cheetah-about-content-detection-robot-bot , maybe the auto upvoting things there is something similar going on. These are all just theories though, I fully admit to having no full clue as to what or why these things continue.
EDIT: Pretty funny, as I was making this comment, the stuff was happening live on one of my posts, within just literally a 2 minute timespan I got nearly a hundred votes on this post https://steemit.com/comics/@cryplectibles/comic-crossovers-that-really-happened-batman-adventures-mashes-up-with-wolverine-from-1997 if I go over to SteemD I can see that these users or bots all have their percentages set to the same or similar things https://steemd.com/@cryplectibles The thing is, I know some of the user names doing this, and I know there are some real life people behind those accounts.
I don't understand it. These bots have so little SP that they stand to make nothing. I can make far more playing some of the games on Steemit
Yet a bot takes literally nothing but a switch of a button to start up, and one person can run many bots, a little SP over a bunch of accounts and over just a month equals free money for nothing. In theory that is. I wish I knew the real story.
But doing that is likely to only make a few cents. Steemit was designed to discourage such activity. You need a lot of SP to make money that way and you either have to earn it or buy your way in.