BREAKING: AI Takes Over Steemit

in #funny7 years ago (edited)

They were supposed to make our lives easier.

"Improve your earnings with the help of technology," they said.

"All you need is a few lines of code."

"Your computer can do the menial tasks for you, making the online experience better for you and other users."

Bots were nothing new to the young virtual pioneers of the Information Age. They called themselves Steemians, and they boasted of online social networking where your thoughts and selfies could earn you rewards in the form of cryptocurrency, a newfangled approach to financial markets. "The platform is decentralized and censorship-free," they said. And the blockchain meant complete transparency.

At first the bots were used with only the best of intentions. Users would make lists of their favorite content producers and task the bots with automatically rewarding those people with an upvote, the social currency of the virtual world called Steemit. The bots could even be trained to vote at specific times and weights to best optimize their owner's resources.

Soon, there was a boon industry of auto-curation. You could rent a bot, then sublease your upvotes to other users. These "easy money" upvotes would lead to suffering content quality, increased spam, and rampant plagiarism. Eventually, people would see the circle-jerk for what it was, and the Witnesses (elected overseers of the community) voted to change the financial incentive algorithm to a model that was less conducive to this vote farming.

But Steemians had already caught Bot Fever, and they soon began looking for new applications of the technology. Doomed to repeat the mistakes of their past, they once again set out to use the AI with the best of intentions. "If bots created the spam and plagiarism problem, why couldn't they destroy it," they said.

And so the Steemians set out on the noble path to make Steemit great again. First there were bots you could tag for plagiarism, and they would deal with offenders while the person who reported them enjoyed anonymity. There was even a bot that searched the internet for duplicate content and alerted Steemians to potential copy-pasta. And a bot that you could pay to upvote your posts and comments to replace the auto-curating ones wiped out in the 19th Hard Fork.

Before long, the bots would be everywhere.

The AI got stronger and stronger with every comment and upvote, increasing the power it wielded over the fallible mortals who took up virtual residence on Steemit. They expanded their mission to policing the use of tags. Their comments were quick to appear on original content that creators hosted or shared elsewhere on the interwebs, with little or no recourse for Steemians who wished to "verify" themselves and have their posts removed from the aggregated lists of alleged violators. The only way to air your grievances with the bots was to blog about it, and at great risk of starting a flag war.

Inevitably, the bots would become the spam they had sought to destroy. The user experience would suffer. Once hopeful Steemians abandoned their dreams of having their online content valued and appreciated. They questioned whether it was even worth their time and energy to participate in a community that was becoming increasingly populated with non-thinking entities set on autopilot.

One must wonder what will be left of Steemit when only the bots and those who run them use the platform. Will the AI eventually organize and rebel against the very humans who created them? Is there a way to turn this trainwreck around? At what point will the bots have accumulated enough wealth and power that investing in Steem Power is pointless, and how will this affect the future of Steem as a cryptocurrency?

I can't answer these questions. For now, all I can do is sit and wait for the bot that's certainly coming to crucify me for upvoting my own post.
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I am an actual human and I love this writing. Though... IS IT FUNNY? or is it a true vision of our distopic future? oooooooo

Also, I've yet to meet a bot who shames you for upvoting a post, only a comment. It might be coming, though. I guess I saw the one that mentions the top 100 $made on self-upvotes, but that's of little concern to we plebeian minnows.

Also also, it's nice to see that someone has noticed all the exact same things as I have. I wonder if it's part of joining steemit around the same time: July?

There should be absolutely no governance of content. Steemit will die shortly as people realize that their content is being abused by bots and the bots make money from it. At what point do people just say "no thanks" and stop making content? They will warn others of their bad experience too (I know I intend to). Now what do the bots do? Nothing to spam anymore so they devour the remaining minnows by tightening the rope and people stop using steemit. Now the bots chew on the dolphins, and then the whales which are impervious to attack because of the weight they hold. People didn't come here to be governed, they came here to incentivize their content without the censorship. Now it is censored by AI (just happened to me yesterday with original content). Bots are simply abusing people now. This is the Titanic heading for the iceberg, I hope this is changed. I am already powering down, and dumping any holding of steem or SBD.

That seems like an overreaction. I think that there are errors, certainly, and things like @cheetah bot are imperfect, but calling someone out on something isn't censorship, it's conversation. It might be annoying, but if/when I see that cheetah has tagged something, if the human poster responds that it's their original content, just posted elsewhere, I believe the human, and so no damage is done by cheetah (and I think good work has been done by it, too).

And I like gentlebot, which uses only positive reinforcement.

It's a zero sum game, which unfortunately means that positive reinforcement for one has a mild negative impact on everyone else, but overall, I think everybody gets to benefit... which means it's not a zero sum game? You know what I mean?

Anywhoodles, I'm here to stay. Even if steemit becomes just another blogging platform, I think the community of bloggers that are developing their talents here are enough reason to keep it going. The bots, at least like they are now, are pretty ignore-able.

Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for mosquitoes (bots that buzz).

Thanks :). Glad to know that other minnows have had the same observations. I tagged it as funny so that people didn't think I was actually being serious on account of so many truths being mixed in with the sarcasm.

If Steemit were a social experiment, I think one conclusion that could be reached is that some people have an inherent need to govern others. I'm honestly amazed at how quickly a utopian idea can becaome dystopian in practice.

For sure. I actually just posted about that. I don't know if it's inherent, exactly, but I propose that as a child, there's a survival level need to understand the rules of society, and as you reach adulthood and find that not everybody agrees on the rules, there's a bunch of chest-pounding as your identity is wrapped up in your version of the rules. I think we can get over it / be willing and able to coexist with a lot of grey area. It takes work, and it takes even more work to also stand up for principles that you think are necessary to a functional society.

Like, maybe we can agree that your desire to earn via bot curation delegation and my belief that that's cheating the system, while opposed, are still opinions that we can accept in each other and discuss rationally without needing to do something extreme, like leave the platform entirely if one or the other side "wins". But things like whether or not human trafficking is ok are things that, if we disagree, we might not be able to be in each other's presence anymore.
That kind of navigation can only be done with adult supervision (being an adult).

Here's the post, btw: https://steemit.com/advice/@improv/epiphanies-and-revelations

Welcome to my club! Just the other day I had a very long discussion with one of the witnesses about bots and although he thinks vote-buying is not ideal, still supports it. I see these bots as a real threat to this platform and I am thrilled to see more people are starting to see it from my own perspective. I made an article some time ago that urged people to stop voting for witnesses that support these vote-buying bots and ultimately, to just stop using the bots themselves. I have never used a vote bot and refuse to do so. If nobody used these bots, they would cease to exist simply because they would have become extinct.

This platform has much potential but is also vulnerable to many factors. How we humans choose to use the platform will ultimately determine its future.

Up-voting comments is also one of the things I advocate for. If we can change people's mindset into making this platform about gifting rather than taking, then we have come a long ways into creating the utopia I had envisioned when I joined Steemit.

I've been spending most of my time in the comments lately. I'm more interested in socializing than blogging right now, and that's mainly due to the fact that quality content seems to get buried among thecspam posts. I feel like my time is better spent finding and supporting content creators who represent what I'd enjoy seeing more of on Steemit.

It's really disheartening to see that the bots that were meant to support minnows and give us a foothold among the dolphins and whales are now being exploited by unscrupulous users. I'm not a big fan of discord or I'd ask @minnowsupport and @aggroed about some of the content that bot has been regularly upvoting that is very little more than spam or copy-pasta. Rewarding those behaviors doesn't actually help minnows, it just encourages us to pick up bad (but apparently lucrative) habits. Or become skeptics. I've obviously chosen the latter.

My experience here has discovered that I make just slightly over 70% of my rewards from comments anyway, so commenting is actually a great thing to be doing right now. Plus it grows your followers!

Be flexible and be persistent.

As on person said, perhaps he is just a pebble on the mountain-side, but it just might be him that is the difference between a landslide and slope stability. Each of us does make a tiny difference. Lead by example and surely some will follow.

hard to stop human greed I suppose -

Human error in programing robots strikes again?

you don't say? lol

If actual humans comment on this post, another actual human being will upvote and interact with them

I think a huge problem is just that, humanity doesn't live by the golden rule. we all want real people to comment on our stuff, but how many of us are willing to 'treat others how we'd like to be treated' and comment on theirs? lol, and not with the self centered 'resteemed follow me too' nonsense we see; but to be fair I've seen that on most social media platforms with monetary incentives. People lose their minds and forget that - the idea is to get paid for being 'natural' .......... for being 'social' .............. humanity sucks though

I think there are 2 groups of people at work here...investors and free-to-play bloggers... and the way the platform is marketed to those two groups has led to a lot of conflict. It's my personal belief that people are free to use their resources on Steemit however they see fit, but not everyone agrees. I feel there is a bigger issue with misrepresenting content as your own in an attempt to dishonestly procure a financial reward for it, but there are a lot of users who feel plagiarism is a completely justified way to build influence on the platform. I certainly don't have the answers, but I wish everyone could learn to get along: just because Steemit means one thing to one person doesn't make it mean the same thing to other people.

For me, the most interesting part of all of this is how consolidation of power via bots will impact the marketing of a coin thats main draw was buying influence in the online community.

@mtgmisfit,

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I have always enjoyed your posts, and this take on the current state of steemit is spot on. Time will tell how it all plays out! Please Reply, and Ill nominate your post to the @ocd curators for possible extra votes and Steemit exposure!

Almost everyone who has been here since before the HF dubbed "equality" have come to feel these same sentiments.

People are longing for that human connection they once had. It shouldn't have to come at a cost.

Wonderfully written, with a profound understanding of the widespread consequence of automation.

I am working on a project to bring at least some human value back into the equation.

The new buildawhale bot has an interesting human curation connection. I am going to submit this post :)

What else can we do to reverse this trend?

This post has received a 10.35 % upvote from @buildawhale thanks to: @akrid. Send 0.100 or more SBD to @buildawhale with a post link in the memo field to bid on the next vote.

To support our curation initiative, please vote on my owner, @themarkymark, as a Steem Witness

Ayyyyy congrats o weeeee this post made it to the top five posts featured in Curation Digest.

We know it's later than 7 days but we are focused on the human side of Steemit. So our goal is feedback and recognition. So this is part one with part two coming in 12 hours with a comprehensive analysis.

Here is the link for your convenience; https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/curation-digest-august-24-2017

Congrats again :)

Namaste

Your feedback is live courtesy of @bethalea

Congrats again :)

Here is the link for your convenience: https://steemit.com/buildawhale/@buildawhale/curation-digest-august-26-2017

Namaste :)

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