RE: Is STEEMIT Rigged? Is it Ethical to use Bots to do your voting and posting? Does this create monopolies of Steem dollars in the hands of a few?
The system is not rigged. Power belongs to those who have made the biggest investment and taken the biggest risk and have the most to lose.
It's an illusion that we could have a system where there is no power. The only thing we can do is to associate power with responsibility and this is what Steem does.
In other words, Steem is not about eliminating power but about irrevocably attaching the responsibility aspect to it. This is the actual difference between Steem and the legacy systems - in Steem you cannot have power and get away without taking responsibility for abusing this power.
Whales who operate bots are exercising their power. And they have the most to lose if their bots bring more harm than good.
You are welcome to indicate unfair action caused by the bots - so that the bot owners can improve them or consider scrapping them. But concluding that the presence of bots makes the system rigged is very inaccurate.
When you make a bot, you are putting your own will into code to act for you. I don't see why this would be unethical. And as innuendo said, if they bots start acting unfavorably, it is in the bot-owners best interest to fix them as soon as possible.
The problem with bots is that it gives a bot creator incredible power over the steemit world. Within a very short time steem power can be created and harnessed to sway the entire system by the voting power of those few individuals. Newbies have no voice whatsoever and the whales essentially control the content of all topics and trending content. This is like the liberal media on sterioids with elites deciding on what the masses get to see. I think its heading down a dark road for such a great new platform for expression of ideas and content. I get that somebody can make and will make bots but the power derived is out of control and will eventually ruin steemit.
Why do you think it is out of control? Certainly, it could be out of control, but as far as I've seen the whales are actually behaving themselves quite well.
The whales always behave. They play with their prey just before they gang up on it and devour it. lol
