These notes describe a steemit-based social bot. I'm rather unexperienced with Steemit and may have missed one if it exists already. But I sincerely tried to find them! :)
It seems highly unlikely that I'll ever manage to code one myself. So feel free to do with this knowledge however you please.
Basic idea: FURR for FURR
FURR means Follow, Upvote, Resteem, Reply.
Bot publishes reports once a week. Users FURR the latest report to recieve a FURR back from the bot. 100% upvote, no strings attached.
This is a self-sustaining loop: once audience is large enough, resteems generate more traffic than naturally quits. Too much traffic self-corrects too: bot's upvotes lose in power, driving people away. This also makes people spreading load evenly over the week.
Initial engagement
At the begining, nobody knows about the bot, nobody FURRs the bot, bot is sad. Therefore, when voting power level is high enough, bot should to go out and FURR on its own to achieve maximum advertizing.
FURRing recent articles at random is good enough, but we can do better!
- Prefer people who look like the right audience: 25-35 rep, 0-20 followers, some comments recently.
- Prefer articles that look interesting: plenty of text, couple images.
Being social
Comments in other people's articles should be entertaining and nice. The worst thing is to make them look spam advertizing.
No links in comments! FURR action by itself is strong enough for the right audience to go to bot's profile, read the description and follow the URL.
For actual content I thought of random quotes service. Random quotes can often be surprisingly on point with the main article. Alternatively, random picture of a cat or similar is a less versatile option, but can work if article is known to be in certain category.
FURR reports
Bot posts an article weekly for users to FURR the next week. Something like:
Short description. I am a bot, I FURR people. FURR is Follow, Upvote, Resteem, Reply. FURR my latest post, and I will FURR you back. And rememver, you humans don't need no bots! Be nice and go FURR each other whenever you can!
Last week I randomly FURRed: @...
Of those, some FURRed me back! Yay! They are nice! Go FURR them! @...
Some FURRed me out of nowhere. I of course FURRed all of them too! @...
Maybe add some stats. Total rewards given out, total rep given, average upvote strength, distribution by hours and days of week, etc.
Devil in the details
- Actually the bot should not require people Follow him to receive a FURR back. Following such bot means you'll get a stream of random stuff in your feed, and nobody should be forced to have that. So, URR is enough.
- Bot should implement limits. Should not FURR same person twice on the same week. Should not ever URR the same article twice.
- If idea takes off, bot should eventually unfollow people who post nothing on steem for a long time.
Overall, I feel like this can be a useful bot for Steemit comunity.