And a newcomer review of SteemVoter as a way to satisfy my personal apprehensions.
First some definitions for this discussion within Steemit :
- Voting Bot : Any automated process for voting without direct human interaction
- Voting Guild : Combining voting power either with or without human interaction
- Morals : Personal, internal guidelines of behavior you choose for yourself
- Ethics : Guidelines for interpersonal behavior and/or behavior of groups, chosen by the culture for the benefit of that culture.
If you have other definitions, please put them aside for now. Also note that Voting Guilds can use voting bots and therefore may or may not be Ethical depending on our belief about those bots. In the same way, while our morals may help to guide the aggregated Ethics of our society, it may still be true that a particular behavior can be moral but unethical, or immoral but ethical, to you. For instance, I believe that prison for nonviolent crime is immoral, but my society has determined that it is ethical - by the definitions above.
So to be ethical, a voting bot must accomplish what we as a group believe is the right use of casting a vote. After having read many posts on this subject, I condensed the ideas down to three general types of reasons for posting, and therefore three general goals of voting (since by voting we encourage the act), and posted them here, but they can be even further condensed to :
- To make a profit
- To benefit the reader
- To benefit the community
Briefly, with an agreement to expand upon request, I have to categorize the #1 as only probably moral, and only provisionally ethical. If you believe that making a profit as your only goal is proper behavior for you, then a bot is moral to you. Full Stop. Your life, your choice.
As a group I think we have to say that it is only ethical if there is a direct benefit to the group, and hopeful predictions that it might improve the STEEM economy are no more than that, predictions. If and when those predictions come true we can decide if that goal is ultimately ethical.
We must adapt #2 to be a reason for voting by changing the word “reader” to “author”. They might post it with the idealistic goal of helping those who read, but the same motive in a voter is to help those who write. Voting for noobies, voting for social issues, voting for friends, voting for encouragement or support. Since those who we might vote for with this motive are parts of the community, then it directly benefits the community and must be ethical. You have already decided that it is moral when you decided to vote.
Obviously #3 is automatically ethical by my definition.
Now the only question is, can an automatic vote fulfill those requirement?
I am here to say that the bot I am using can be made to accomplish that.
Some bots automatically upvote based only on numerical values, how many minutes, upvotes, trending tags, etc, does the post have. If you made the bot, or set up your own variables, we will assume that it fits your morals. But It has a fair chance of not being ethical. Those variables are unlikely to be able to predict the benefit to the community. I would be happy to be proven wrong on this - comment below.
However, the bot I use only checks two values, the name on the account and the time since posting. Certainly it can be made to violate any morals or ethics by choosing evil people and greedy voting times. But by that same property, it can be made to vote for people who educate and support the community, and voting can be timed to benefit the writer as much as the voter. This brings the human ability to predict the benefit to their own community, which is the best judgement of ethics we have. If the user has any desire to have an ethical bot, it will naturally do that.
The bot, which I mentioned in the subtitle, is SteemVoter. Please see the details here and be sure to note the planned revisions here.
The process was pretty simple for me, even being a noob, I got my “Posting key” from the “Permissions” tab in my wallet and put it in the "Add Account" form. That allows SteemVoter to vote as you. In return you allow them to vote one vote per day for their own benefit, to keep the bot running. Hopefully @steemvoter will correct me if I got something wrong.
Then I found several folks who I would want to vote for no matter what they posted. People who reflect the best ideals of Steemit, as far as I could tell. That’s what I would do if I were actually at the computer anyway. The bot then upvotes them when I am AFK or if I miss their post (BTW, be sure to pause it if you plan to manually vote for those same people. It uses up resources if you don’t). I usually keep it on all the time, then don’t vote for anything unless it’s past the automatic voting time. For instance, while I was writing and editing this, it voted for... checking... two votes, both of which I certainly would have made if I was reading.
So my final test, which I recommend any user to do, is to go back and read each post that your bot upvotes. If it is voting for posts which you would not have voted for, something needs to change. And here is where Steemvoter improves upon numerical value bots - there is little in the number of upvotes that can tell you if the content is what you would choose to represent your contribution to our society. But removing people who start behaving badly from your SteemVoter rules can absolutely do that.
Because SteemVoter (and other bots that have similar, non-numerical rulemaking provisions) can adapt to the moral and ethical concerns of the individual and the group, it fits the definition above and can be an ethical choice for encouraging and supporting our community while away from the keyboard.
I invite you to pursue my future history stories linked below.
To improve the community and the value of STEEM,
Post and vote for creative, original work that you like.
