The ethics of Using Bots

in #steem7 years ago

   Before you decide to agree, or disagree with me, grant me the opportunity to explain my position thoroughly. As a fairly new Steemian, every day I spend on this platform is an chance to learn something new, and there might be a time in the future were I will think differently. However, it is my intention to start a conversation with some of you with the intention of maybe revising my own convictions, as well as sharing my current opinion.

Steemit’s Original Vision

   There is an old post by Dan Larimer that we could say encapsulates the original vision he had for this platform. I would encourage any new Steemian to read it carefully, it seems to me, that the almost Utopian idea of a system designed to reward people who help other people was nothing short of genius.

   But just like any socio-economical idea in history, there are elements and concepts left up to interpretation, which of course always leads to disagreements and potential conflicts.

These are Dan’s own word, while describing the Ethos of Steemit and the roll of its Whales.

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“Good Whales act in ways that maximize the value of their capital. The side effect of their actions is to increase the value of everyone else’s capital at the same time. These individuals are motivated to counteract any abuse they see. The larger the whale, the more incentive they have to be a good whale”

   One of the flaws with the statement that may have not been predictable, might be that most of Steemit’s whales think themselves to be good whales acting in the best interest of Steemit. In a system that does not have a central authority, or even a set of well defined rules and laws, right and wrong should really be a consensus of its citizens, but as we know today only those who hold a lot of Steem are the ones with a loud voice or a vote.

   I am not saying however, that all is lost and it's time to abandon the ship, I’m certainly not leaving and I still believe we can find the right compromise. I’m simply stating that these problems are present, and our current fork has enhanced some of the logical warts.

But taking a step back, let me start by asking one question...

What Makes Steem Valuable?

   I could attempt to approach the argument from a strictly technical angle, but since it's not really my strong suit, I will leave such task to those who understand it a lot better than me, speculative markets and blockchain technology are subjects that require a lot more than one blog post in my opinion, and I’m not the best man for the job.

   I will attempt to define the socio economic worth of Steemit; When I first joined this platform, my initial impressions were maybe oversimplified, and thus easy for a noob to understand.


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Image Credit

   I would like to say that this rule holds true all the time, but we know it not to be the case. I’ve stumbled upon thousands of posts that I believe were incredibly undervalued and it was almost painful to see them almost ignored. This is not to say everything on Steemit is valuable, there is a never ending influx of Spam/Shit content, and what I could only describe as wasted computing power, flooding the network every single day.

   There are of course ongoing efforts to Clean the Network from these spammers and plagiarists, their work is extremely valuable to Steemit, but they are not without their flaws, and sometimes make painful mistakes. But that is a subject for another post all together.

Then the bots broke the Balance

   It would probably be pointless to attempt to make anything resembling a moral argument when talking about resteeming services or upvote Bots. By their own nature it's an amoral topic, it would be like me attempting to talk about the morality of eating pizza.

   I chose pizza for this example because I think it might do the best job of explaining my position. Just because eating pizza is not immoral, it does not mean that I believe that eating pizza all the time is good for me. I would be delusional if I thought so, and would end up paying steep consequences for holding that idea.


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Disclaimer.- I love pizza

   Using the same logic, if using upvote bots is not necessarily immoral, or to use a less charged word unethical. This would not mean that is necessarily good for the the network in the long term, they could if they continue to be abused, become the catalysts for uncontrollable shit posting.

   There are of course many authors who are adding a lot of value to Steem, some treat Steemit like a job, and a good percentage of these authors use upvote bots and resteeming services to gain some visibility with good results. But, on the flip side of that coin there are users who are simply here to gamble their casino money, their posts are for all tends and purposes as valuable as fart on a windy day, but by playing the upvote bidding game, have managed to get a return on their worthless content, and I find this problematic.

You might be reading my post and asking yourself, Why should I care?

   Maybe I’m guilty of worrying a bit too much, but maybe I’m not the only who has been thinking about this. But, lets say for the sake argument that Steemit’s content keeps on getting diluted with shit posting, let's say that more and more people stop making a conscious effort to make good posts, to add value to the platform and decide to throw in the towel and give in to the casino upvote game.

   What would that look like? What would be the motivation for mass adoption? What would make a big youtuber jump onto this platform and abandon twitter, or facebook? If the value of the content becomes unimportant, how are we to grow from the beta stage? I'm having a hard time answering these questions, and finding bitter flavors at every turn. But it hurts me to imagine what the worth of 1 Steem would be on a blockchain like that.

   Granted, I may have painted a grim picture, and it might never get to that point. But I would like to think that this reflection, this blog entry will get to someone who might be thinking about lowering his/her standard, and simply jumping on the upvote/resteem game to reconsider his/her convictions.

   I’m hopeful that sometime in the future, the groups and whales who run the upvote bots can find a way to balance the scale again, not because of any ethical or moral argument, as I’ve said before there is nothing there to discuss, but because they as well should have an interest in the growth and mass adoption of Steemit, and it would very short sighted to ignore this problem and sweep it under the rug.


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I would love to hear your thoughts on this...

Musically yours

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Thank you for pointing me out to this post by Dan. I had already read it before probably more than once but that is exactly what I was looking for without knowing about it.

Steem minimizes the ability of minnows to cheat by distributing rewards proportional to n2. This means minnows have far less influence relative to their weight and whales have far more influence. This means that minnows only have influence when they work together.

By requiring people to work together to gain influence we bias rewards toward common causes that grow the pie. It doesn’t make sense to collude with others if you must share the reward. It will lower the profitability of defecting and make it more likely to get noticed and countered by others.

A whale is effectively the same as a large group of minnows colluding together. In this case the whale can act more efficiently and doesn’t have to worry about defectors.

The larger the group of whales and minnows agreeing to a particular payout the less likely that the payout is harmful to the pie and the more likely it is beneficial.

The solution to a lot of Steem woes seems to reside in the non linear reward curve.

Dan's latest comment on the blockchain is about exactly that aspect.

I have always been against the linear curve and am sad that the community voted for it.[1]

Why did you stumble on that post by Dan? Were you going through all his posts titles?

I've been having some interesting conversations with users that were here prior to the fork that changed the rewards to the current linear curve.

It seems to me that if we really wanted to keep the original vision of Steemit we should at least attempt to find a way to retain the core ideas Dan had for Steem. I've been told by a few Steemians that there is absolutely no way we are going back to non linear, but I thought it valuable to attempt to work out a solution to our current problem with what we have currently.

I believe its time well spent to read thru Dan's old posts, I never met the man and probably never will, but its obvious he is a bright guy and not just in the technical sense which of course pretty obvious. He might have come up with a way actually solve social issues and wealth distribution in one go, and to think that code could do that is a bit mind blowing to me.

To answer your last question, i just now found the giant post with blocktrades... its going to take me a while to read, but I intend to do so.

I've read 95% of Dan's post on Steem. I think you might like this one I wrote about Dan if you haven't read it. It's 80%+ quotes from Dan.

https://steemit.com/liberty/@teamsteem/thank-you-dan-larimer-you-are-a-great-mentor

On my way to read it.. MSP show is over! :)

@meno You write very well. I read every word. I struggled with huge number of comments below though. Congrats to you for replying to so many of them!

I would like to add to of my impressions:

Bots were good in the early days to encourage posters. Now we no longer need upvoting bots. There are enough humans to do the job. Maybe keep the anti-spam and anti plagarism bots. Otherwise, the upvoting bots are just miliking the reward pool for reasons not related to altruism.

Second comment is on whales. I agree that whales should act in their own collective best interest by upvoting qualtiy content. However if 99% do that, 1% can just get away with miliking the system. I can imagine that new potential whales are joining steemit thinking that they can be part of the 1% then 10%..... We need curators to rate the curators!

Exactly, you summarized it perfectly... if only 1 whale decides to not participate then the solution could not be implemented. It might be extremely difficult for all of them to sit down and agree on this, its not secret that they are not all friends, but I'm not ready to say it can't be done.

Even in politics sometimes our opposing parties manage to pass the almost unicornian bipartisan bills, with the obvious intention of helping the country. I would like to believe that we can do the same with Steemit.

Thank you for adding your two cents, I feel like this post has become a little repository for collective wisdom. cheers @meno

Excellent post and queries, meno and well worth considerable thought.
The intentions of the creators are not relevant to me at all...It's only the health of the child which should be considered. How is the child being raised and nurtured? With vacuous grandiloquence? With being taught to ignore crucial political and religious argumentation? By shadow banning the queries of other children if the parent thinks the questions are too dangerous to be considered?
Anyway, the algorithms of crypto, in general, ​seem suspect to me so I don't hold out much hope for them as being the soteriological​ white knight that many on the trending page assert; which is why I​ don't bother with that page often.
But I enjoy Steemit and have met some very cool and thoughtful people:), and my personal hope for Steemit or a website like it would be for it to be a type of basic income dividend where the reward pool was more egalitarian and less prone to the casino ethos.

There might be a lot of people that think like you Andrew... its probably crucial to the success of the platform that in the future the inner workings of the technology are something the average user does not need to worry about. When internet gave it's first step the online world was only for the highly technical users, and we know it now to be the case.

I've also enjoyed my time on Steemit, and have me made some good friends. Its because of this second experience we share that I would like for them to stay and thrive.

I would like you to thrive, you have a lot of brain food to share and of course some rocking tunes as well!

Ive never been a believer that bots in general make Steemit a more social ecosystem. Yes they can do some cool stuff but this explosion of vote buying and reateeming bots is not IMHO a positive move.

That is exactly how i feel, which is why I would like it if more of us start having this conversation, maybe we can make enough noise to get some input for some big Steem Holders.

-resteem..

  • Are you sure?
  • Heh... should I be scared?

lolololoolool
I never truly got to state my case to you cuz the words didnt come out. But I feel very strongly that in order to make better followers and better whales we need to rally behind truly honest and honorable witnessess and/or investors. I'm not 100 percent sure who those people are. And I'm also not sure we can get EVERYONE to agree. Can't even get everyone in MSP to agree and thats okay but people power comes from numbers.

As for bots, I think that its valuable for people to start talking economics because we as artists and writers talking about the value of steem or eos or whathaveyou is moot unless we talk about how steem can gain in value again. We keep saying invite more people but as far as I know that means more and more steem gets made there for less valuable, right? you tell me.

More users increase the capital value of steem the same way it gives facebook value. This is an attention economy, meaning the value comes from having so much attention in one place. Hence why we had adverts on TV, and now all over the internet. The value comes from the economy that values our attention. That's why Zuckerberg is a multimillionaire. The difference with steem is it is supposed to be decentralised because we become the stake holders. Unfortunately all the payouts are going back to the whales, so currently that isn't happening.

Ahhh yess and it all goes back to the problem of those persnickety hoarding whales feeding off our content. Tsk. Tsk.

I need to finish the story aboutvmaking tgem behave. Yall should check out @meesterboom s page about hating whales lol

Don't get my wrong, I don't hate whales. There's maybe one or two that have lost my respect but the majority are just acting the way the incentives align them to. The original incentives were to spread the wealth, not for the sake of socialism but because a token in the hands of many is more valuable than a token in the hands of a few. This is also what should incentivise uplifting the network instead of the self, but this is now a bear market, so whales are bearishly clawing for more stake while being reckless about the price as it appears uncontrollable.

I think that sums it up Beanz, we seem to be in Bear market currently, and maybe there is something to be said about the problems the website had for what it seemed to me a month. But we should not be quick to discard the people who left for other reasons as well.

I'm only in crypto kindergarten yall. Whats a bear market? Should i hide my pic-a-nic basket?

hahahah no, no need, its not really a term used for crypto only... I will venture to say it's probably very old terminology... It basically states the general tendency of movement in price of an asset. For example, we could say that Sears and traditional retail is on a bear market because every year they lose money and valuation. Their stock keeps on sinking lower....

The other term you will read/hear is Bull Market, which of course it's the opposite.

And to make sure that you become a super expert here! People's opinion on an asset, if they think a stock or coin is going up or down is expressed like this.

"I'm feeling pretty bullish on bitcoin right now"

"It looks to me that Steem is quite bearish"

There you go lima... you are officially an expert!!!

;p

Great post @meno, and many great points raised, here...

Not sure how to reply without ending up with a dissertation, so I'll stick to a few impressions to augment what you wrote, based on my 10 months here...

One of the things in the whole "good whales" issue is that most of the original whales of Steemit were developers/techies and blockchainiacs, rather than content creators. Which is a little ironic, for a system billing itself as a social content site. One of the points I've been beating to death since my earliest days here is that PEOPLE build communities, tech/code does not.

Be that as it may, content creation has always taken somewhat of a back seat to "grinding the gears" with app developments and bots and automation.

Now, given that so many good whales ARE developers, and they DO sincerely want to maximize value (and their investment) we tend to end up with a situation their impression of "what's best" is limited in scope. Steemit will never become more than "niche" in scope UNLESS more attention is paid to content, and less to code.

How that will actually play out, I don't know.

I say you did a great job at making your point, and I would like to believe that we could get the input of some whales regarding this very subject. It really is on their best interest as well, like you pointed out, if we can attract better content creators, we can effectively affect the cost of Steem positively!

I appreciate your input, the fact that you are for all tends and purposes a vet of the system, reassures me that we are on to something bring up this subject.

Much success

@meno

Upvote bots are mostly used as an investment in promotion. As long as it's economical to promote a post they will be around and promotion can serve a valuable purpose.

There are going to be many uses for the blockchain many of which will be via posts. Just think zappl for tweets. We need more services that will filter the available content in a more targeted way.

@eroche that is exactly what I was just discussing with a fellow steemian, that if we implement more targeted content with the creation of apps that would basically be steem's response to tweets, or instagram it might solve much of the spamming post. At least in the sense that It would allow us to filter out content we might no be interested in.

I'm loving the fact that this post is becoming a pool for ideas, this was my intent by writing it.

Thank you for stopping by.

I like your post but I don't agree on your idea of pizza. This is a pizza

Well I have to say I agree with your rebuttal! after all... una vera pizza è arte

..and to be IN-TOPIC what worries me about Steemit aren't much the bots, but people with a bit of reputation which abuse of it to push fake news (or old news). Here is and example https://steemit.com/money/@joshsigurdson/bank-accounts-seized-in-greece-as-system-comes-crashing-down#@luigi-tecnologo/re-luigi-tecnologo-re-joshsigurdson-bank-accounts-seized-in-greece-as-system-comes-crashing-down-20170913t195254643z the funny part is that you can make money commenting on it

That is funny, but not in a good sense... I've thought about this problem myself, but to think that we could effectively censor content, would be to make move against what decentralized content is supposed to be about. This might be the unavoidable cost of freedom of speech.

Eventually the bots will have to go. Given a hypothetical situation where Steem does gain mass popularity, keeping a check on shitposting and mass upvotes cannot be left to the goodwill of the Whales. The shit is bound to hit the fan. So the question is; Till when shall Steem allow bots, given that a significant amount of activity on this platform is being operated and controlled by bots.

You have a valid point there, I can't think of a way to enforce such a thing and I don't know if we even should enforce the banning of bots... meaning, I would like for people to realize the double edge sword for themselves and maybe they can dwindle away, or maybe we are not looking at it from the right angle... but I'm glad this post has started this dialogue!

Extremely valid points all, @meno. It would be so easy to just start spamming posts and riding the upvote bot train and no, that's not the way things are supposed to work.

Steemit is like life in microcosm in a way: shortcuts usually lead to dead ends. Bots are just such a shortcut because, long-term, they lead to the outcome you describe:

Steemit’s content keeps on getting diluted with shit posting, let's say that more and more people stop making a conscious effort to make good posts, to add value to the platform and decide to throw in the towel and give in to the casino upvote game.
What would that look like? What would be the motivation for mass adoption? What would make a big youtuber jump onto this platform and abandon twitter, or facebook? If the value of the content becomes unimportant, how are we to grow from the beta stage? I'm having a hard time answering these questions, and finding bitter flavors at every turn. But it hurts me to imagine what the worth of 1 Steem would be on a blockchain like that.

Me, I have used them and not used them. The conclusion I've come to is that Steemit is ultimately made by people, for people and of people. It can only grow in magnitude and in quality if the people themselves do so as individuals and as curation collectives.

Bots are useful as a nice little boost here and there but overuse them would turn them toxic -- no, cancerous.

hey @edumurphy thanks for reading and commenting, well as you know I agree very much with your position on the matter. A few days ago @steemitgraven29 did a great little breakdown on the actual ROI of bots. I would encourage you to visit that blog, it really does put everything into perspective.

https://steemit.com/curation/@steemitgraven29/my-experience-buying-an-upvote-and-my-conclusions