We all know they are going to take over the world anyways, we might as well make them as smart as we can and get it over with. I wrote a post about the discussion of bots on steemit and if they should be taken off the system. If you are anti-bot and think they are the bane of the site, please click on this link: @whatageek/the-death-of-the-bots-should-steemit-remove-bots and let me know. You are not alone on your distrust of the robot uprising and the damage they do to the social media site. But this post is only for suggestions to make bots smarter (and fairer), if we decide to keep them, or, if we realize they are here to stay. Please only comment about that in this post. The idea came from @personz who mentioned bots are dumb in the way they "blinldy vote for everything" and this got me thinking about ways we can program them to be smarter. Also @personz is working on a project to bring smarter features to people in simpler ways, so check out his page for a link to his FOSSbot.
Now I am creative not programming, so if any of these ideas are not possible, please let me know. I think they are though, from what I know of if/then statements. I know that bots will never do the job as well as humans can on individual curation of a piece but they can always be better. One of the things we can try to make bots more efficient, is to add parameters to our bots to filter what they vote on. We can:
-Program the bot to only like 2-4 posts a day for each person you are upvoting. That way users are free to post as much as they want and will only get upvotes for their first couple posts.
-Filter based on tags so we get more diversity in the posts. Too many steemit posts? You can have your bot ignore the ones with the steemit tag
-We can also filter on things like word length and how many pictures in the post. Maybe we can set it up to upvote one post that is under 500 words and two that are over per day. Again, this does not, in any way, guarantee quality, but just something to think about when we think how to filter through content.
-And there is also rep scores, if we think that is a useful indication of anything.
One of the cons about bots that was mentioned was when users set them and forget them and how that makes things difficult for new users and new content. This is just a discussion idea, so please take it as such, but maybe users have to log in every week or month if they want to keep the votes as they are. If they don't, their votes get changed to support something else. That could be their votes gets turned into 1% for all posts on steemit or maybe we could spread it out between the users who did log in and mirror their results. Or maybe trust a system like @curie if they have manual curation going? That way people keep their curation rewards and we mix things up. This idea is a little rough so help me refine it (or junk it) in the comments.
Lastly we could add a human element and have bots only suggest what we should upvote but then users have to go through the list and do it themselves. I think I recall a user who was doing this.
These are just ideas, let me know in the comments if you have better ones or can improve on them. The goal, if bots are to be our friends, is to make them as efficient as possible to get quality content seen and help new users make a name for themselves who just joined the site, especially if they work hard and are talented.
*my upvotes/rep disclaimer: @whatageek/my-steemit-account-where-i-stand-on-bots-self-votes-and-multiple-account