What are your thoughts on voting bots in general? I'm willing to give up my steemvoter relationship, but I remain torn on the issue of bots.
What are your thoughts on voting bots in general? I'm willing to give up my steemvoter relationship, but I remain torn on the issue of bots.
I've made decent money operating voting bots for curation rewards, so my opinions are at least a little biased. I think they play into my whole philosophy of incentives: everything has consequences, and it's not always obvious what those consequences are going to be.
My take is practical: we should design our systems and incentives to try to maximize fairness (and whatever else we want to maximize), while recognizing that when there's money on the table, people will take it. If people can take that money using automation, they'll do it. We're going to have bots -- so the question needs to be something like "how do we design our systems to incentivize the least-harmful bots possible?"
Curation rewards are a great example: should we or shouldn't we pay curation rewards? With curation rewards, you get lots of bots chasing curation rewards (like mine); without curation rewards, we'd get a massive explosion of these new pay-to-vote bots that everybody loves and/or hates (the randowhales, bellyrubs, selfgoat-whatever bots).