Is Reddit Being Overtaken By Bots? Could Steemit Go The Same Way?

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

Reddit Bot 6.png

Didn't he look happy before the bots got to him?

Bots are becoming a hot topic on Steemit, with opinions mixed. Reddit appears to be in the later stages of a similar situation.

I still stay apprised of Reddit to help with gauging sentiment on my speculative crypto purchases. Some of the alt coins have solid communities on Reddit, and the trader subreddits can be quite useful.

The fact is, there are now so many bots on Reddit that the community has created a bot to...rate all the other bots.

Reddit Bot 1.png

Friends don't let friends go to r/Bitcoin.

This has been going on long enough for them to have almost 100,000 data points charted.

Reddit Bot 4.png

Bad-bot votes appear to be outnumbered by Good-bot votes approximately 5 to 1.

Back on Steemit, I'm noticing increasing discussion about bots. This is probably to be expected, as more and more bots come online.

Some bots take after the original wang-bot, and are rather universally reviled:

Reddit Bot 9.png

...or wear out their welcome very quickly:

Reddit Bot 8.png

Actually, this could be a human.

I would say those in favor of bots, or neutral enough not to care much, are generally in the numerical majority. Certain bots have very faithful followings, such as Randowhale, particularly in the minnow community.

However, those against bots tend to be much more vehement in their positions, creating a countervailing effect in public sentiment. They comment more frequently, and thoroughly, on the topic.

Comments such as these have been increasing on my blog, as of late:

Reddit Bot 2.png

It's not impossible to see both sides of this issue, either. Allow me to explain.

Recently, I saw a post for a new bidbot for Steemit; which bot is immaterial. The interesting thing was that of the 22 comments, 13 were notifications by bots, which is roughly 60%.

I promise that this incredibly large picture I edited to demonstrate the position of the anti-botters was less fun for me to create than it will be for you to scroll past:

Reddit Bot 3.png

Identifying information removed to protect the actually-innocent.

These users are doing nothing wrong, and this account in particular was brand new and was advertising a service.

This is merely an example of what some people refer to as "bot-spam". Often, these bot votes are cast by other users and not solely the author, which gives them a "tipping" function. Whether any individual use of a bot is adding or detracting from the community at any given time depends not only on the specific use-case, but also the individual's philosophy on automation in general.

Reddit Bot 11.png

The truth is that we all benefit from huge amounts of machine automation every day, merely by virtue of even working on a computer or mobile device. We all must be open to at least some degree of machine automation, lest we hold back progress. But is there a point that is too much, and how do we know when we get there?

I'd like to be clear in saying I am relatively neutral on this topic. I would prefer engagement to remain mostly human, but I'm not convinced that most bots detract from that outcome as of yet.

Reddit Bot 10.png

However, sometimes it does feel as if we've tumbled down the rabbit-hole when large swaths of comments are actually just bots, replying to other bots.

Like, am I really here, man? Or am I locked inside of a Chinese room?

Reddit Bot 7.png

Sources: Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, Thomas Cole "The Course Of Empire", r/btc
Copyright: TV Tropes, Terminator 1 & 2, GettyImages.com, http://cse3521.artifice.cc/chinese-room.html, Hackernoon.com, TechCrunch.com

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Bots are really just a reflection of the human behaviour behind their creators.

They can be spammers or exploiters that are gaming the system. They can be purely for-profit or have benevolant intentions that help the community by doing helpful leg work like checking for plagairism or identifying undervalued posts.

At the end of the day I have no issue with automation. Like any tool or technology, it is not good nor evil but it can be used for either and this discussion might be more about the bot-masters than anything else.

Who is pulling the strings?

Agreed. Thanks for your thoughts!

For the most part I'm not a fan. So many have huge messages with graphics. Cheetah & the original content bots seem good, but I kind of loathe the ones where people have paid to have their content upvoted regardless of the quality.

Half the time on the site it feels as if I'm either scrolling through bot spam or reading articles that feel bot generated & it can get a little discouraging feeling my time being wasted for another person's profit.

I understand how you feel. Vote buying / Vote trading is actually no different really than Randowhale, except in magnitude, although they are treated vastly differently by the community.

I'm reminded of the lower bar to "what is stealing" that some people use when checking out of a hotel room...

Bro, I'm so damn busy I can't keep up. I had a mini conversation with you on this before. I prefer to do everything organically. Even when I go hit up new minnows, I tend to type different comments and yes I actually read over them to see who the heck these people are because many times, they may not even speak English...Hmm...and now I have become sidetrack. I think I'm going to talk about the communication gap on Steemit in my next podcast and why it may be a good thing, or bad. Anyway thanks for sharing...Yeah...I don't give a hoot about the bots, I'm too busy already.

I know what you mean. Steemit can absorb as much time as you throw at it.

I'm completely ignoring my feed at this point and barely up to date on replies.

It could be a very lucrative business here if you are in control of 5 power bots, just going around curating and you come in and claim rewards, the tipping service bots is big business here and it is getting very competitive... you probably notice it has led to some competitors dropping prices to remain competitive...we see how this one unfolds, I myself taking a neutral stand, and won't be a hypocrite as I would love if those powerful voting bots visit my page....i guess the next evolution is finding a balance

I, too, am taking a wait and see approach.

We can always mute the bots we don't like, personally, but we must remember how it makes the site look to those users who either are new or haven't loggedin, for whatever reason.

Yea, hopefully we can all evolve and coexist peacefully with the Bots, I think they are here to stay

Excellent high quality post and a very relevant topic. It seems that if bots were somehow banned, that we would have a genuine community without manipulation. We were introduced last week by jerry banfield to the games the top authors are playing to achieve their position and payouts. I hate gaming of systems to benefit the few who are bent to grab more than they would have otherwise earned. So if people can game this much, how much more will bots be able to game since they can work 24/7 and without much of a cost. My fear is the effect of manipulation wherever it comes from. upvoted and resteemed.

Thank you, morseke1!

It's definitely a tightrope to walk, that's for sure. No bots means no defense against spammers and plagiarizers, but too many and we'll turn off your average social media user.

Good article, and I think I agree with your position.

Maybe bots should be able to declare themselves, or else be flagged as such by the community. Then people who don't like them can mute them (perhaps granting exceptions to ones they don't mind).

I'm sure there would be problems with doing this (like with everything), and I haven't given it too much thought yet.

It's a good idea to brainstorm, but my first though is, how do you tell who or what is a bot? Bots would avoid declaring themselves if they were up to no good.

At least good ol' Cornholio always declares himself rather abruptly.

Continuing the brainstorm then :) ...

Yes, those could be tagged as such by the community. Each 'tag' action adds to the accounts 'bot' score (a similar process could designate 'spam'). Maybe this could be weighted by SP (like rewards/reps are), and then individual users could set thresholds for each, so comments from accounts exceeding their thresholds are muted.

In fact, my @steemreports search is thinking in this direction, but at very early stages:
http://www.steemreports.com/?search=bots

Make it something that can be tagged and filtered by individual user preference sounds like a pretty harmless improvement to me.

My position you already know. It's in the comments screenshot above in your post. But it doesn't matter what we think. The whales are in charge here and they control these bots. They are here to earn and as easy as possible.

Thank you for helping to spawn this discussion, by the way. I obscured your information in the screenshot, just in case you wanted to keep it to a bit more of a private audience.

I know we can't really stop bots, so you are correct in that for now we are just along for the ride.

I know we can't really stop bots, so you are correct in that for now we are just along for the ride.

That's the problem, that because we can't stop them, the bot owners don't even take the time to review the content curating. They always vote for the same author, so no new authors can come in in this closed club. If bots are banned, the site will be controlled by real human and the "trending" will be what's really trending. Remember when there was a bot blackout?

"Remember when there was a bot blackout?"

I do, a problem with the API as I recall. It was a very quiet morning that day on Steemit.

If we can break the self-fulfilling prophecy of "Voting on stuff that makes rewards = curation rewards", then bots wouldn't want to do it...

I don't mind bots at all or the purpose they serve, but I do mind them clogging up the comment threads as simple advertisements for said service. As you know, I believe comments is where community happens, and bots, while useful for some things, do nothing to enhance community.

Generally speaking, I'd have to agree with you there. I found it a bit funny when Commentwealth attempted to reply to Hodor.

See: Cornholio.

Steemit has a LOT more bots than Reddit, used both for good, and bad purposes.

You say that 100,000 interactions on reddit is a lot...but Reddit is big. Very, Very big. 200+ million unique users. In 2015, it had 73 million posts, 700+ million comments, and 6.8 billion upvotes.(This is from wikipedia)

So a 100,000 interactions is peanuts. It's nothing. By comparison, a 100,000 interactions on Steemit would be a LOT.

Ah, I'm afraid you've misread the article. I never highlighted the number of total bot interactions anywhere.

There are orders of magnitude more than 100,000 interactions on Reddit. The 100,00 number is how many unique users have voted on either GoodBots or BadBots with this one particular voting bot.

As you might imagine, that is a vastly smaller number.

Oh I understood that, maybe I wrote it the wrong way. I'm just saying that a single bot getting 100,000 on reddit is not a big deal because the sheer number of interactions that happen there.

On the other hand, I'm sure a few bots on Steemit have at least 10s of thousands of interactions, and that is crazy for a site that only has 300k accounts(and much less that are actually active).

What I'm saying is that reddit has a lot of bots, but the proportion of bots to humans on reddit is much lower than on Steemit

"I'm just saying that a single bot getting 100,000 on reddit is not a big deal"

Ah, well, what I was saying is that I've only been seeing this particular bot pop up recently. I think he's rather new, and most people don't even know how to vote.

I do think bots at Reddit are probably at an all-time high, but I would agree that there seems to be a greater proportion of comments on Steemit that have bot comments.

I have been avoiding most of Reddit other than cryptocurrency related areas for about a year, however. It's possible there are far more or less bots than I am aware of in the "main" areas, like r/all.

Thanks for the discussion.

Less bots, more human feedback imo:)