You might have noticed that whenever someone submits a new post, it gets a ton of upvotes in a few minutes. I'm not talking about 10 upvotes in 10 minutes. I'm talking about 40+ upvotes in less than 10 minutes. It sounds incredibly unbelievable but it's true for some of the posts popping up these past few days. My previous post got up to 46 upvotes in the first 6 minutes. How is this possible? How could so many people have discovered my posts over thousands upon thousands of other posts and how could they all have read it and upvoted in 6 minutes? It was incomprehensible to me but after a while a few commentors clarified that this was the work of evil bots. As I checked the profiles of many of the voters, I realized that they hadn't posted a single story; their blog submissions were as empty as my wallet. I had thought that bots couldn't be on websites because of captchas and just general site security. But unfortunately, none of the bots that I came across were banned.

The creators of the bots seek to earn money from curation rewards. The bots have no Steem Power as of yet but gradually they'll gather enough Steem Power to become something similar to a Steem Whale which frankly, isn't the best thing that could happen to Steemit.

The biggest exploit is in front of our eyes but we cannot see it.

When the voting power of the bots gets significantly high, their creators will sell them to whoever pays them the most. The buyers will then use the bots to upvote their or other's posts. Not only does this break all the ideas and morals of Steemit, it makes people lose trust in the platform. When something as big and exploitative like bots cannot be banned, what hope is there for the banning of hackers and scammers?

These bots add no value or interest to Steemit and exist only for the sole purpose of exploiting Steemit

A community can't survive when it's being exploited, it's the basic rule. Sure, there are bots that are helpful to the whole community, for example wang and cheetah bot. Wang educates new users about the site, while cheetah celebrates originality. But the bots that I'm talking about are incredibly different from these ones.

If the bots aren't banned soon, they will gather enough voting power that'll enable them to upvote the posts of their owner/creator. Even worse thing is that we have no idea who has created those bots. It could be you or even me for all you know.

Not only do they hurt the Steemit community, but they also discourage authors and writers from posting their content here on Steemit. When their content gets dwarfed by the upvote brigade on other posts, they think that those are real votes and not bot-votes which discourages them massively. This issue is not known widely enough to do something about it which is why I'm campaigning here and calling for an immediate ban of bots.

Get your banhammers, devs of Steemit: It's time to stop.

It is time for Steemit to ban them, steps must be taken to protect the value of this site. Bots have no place on a platform that provides entertainment, enjoyment and even employment to some of you. I urge the Steem devs to take proper steps to ban these bots because if this issue is ignored long enough, the list of Steem whales would be so long that you'd just stop caring about Steemit at that point.

We all support Steemit fully and want everything in it's best interest. And right now, banning these upvoting bots should be at the very top of our lists.

UPDATE: Just after five minutes this post ended up with 50+ upvotes. This is exactly what I was talking about. This is getting absolutely out of hand and something has to be done about this. I hope my voice is heard.

#steemit #bots #cryptocurrency #steem #votingpower #steempower #votes #new