On Bots

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This will probably be my last post on the topic ( unless I think of something else to say ; -), and it's only for my own benefit, but I want to save all these links in one place so I don't need to scroll back through my post/resteem history when I need to refer to one of them in the comments. There are a number of ideas that come up repeatedly when the question of bots arises.

In short, my position continues to be that in the long run, a combination of human and automated curators will do a better job at discovering quality posts than humans alone. Bots are just tools, and a tool can be used well or used badly. It is a mistake to blame bots for bad decisions that are made by some human operators. It is also a mistake to think that what we see from bots after just a few months of development is what we will always see. Here are the things I've written on the topic:

• My thoughts on the controversy over upvote bots, Sep 9, 2016
• A Far-Fetched Prediction, Sep 28, 2016
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and The SteemBot Revolution, Oct 22, 2016
• On SteemBots and Voting Errors, Oct 24, 2016
• Not Voting Is Bot Voting, Feb 8, 2017

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Promoting from Comment, Feb 14, 2017

It's important to remember that we're looking at first generation bots. In the long run, the bots that succeed will be the ones that promote steem's long term value. A short list of things bots can do that human curators can't/won't:

• Judge all articles using a single, consistent standard.
• Mine statistical correlations between post content/metadata and steem value
• Work 24x7x365
• Level the playing field for authors between short posts which humans view quickly (10 memes per minute per human?) and longer posts which are time consuming to read manually (some longer posts can take 5-15 minutes to read carefully).
• Check for plagiarism
• Check for repeated posts
• Evaluate posts in multiple languages.

Of course there's more, but hopefully that gets the point across.