'Bots Game The System
Everyone knows that.
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Bot's make curation a farce.
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Bots don't read, enjoy or value a post. Bot's process the system for money. Bot's are the only way that one person can 'curate' a post and make lots of money with rep 25 bots. That require a LOT of bots. A fraction of a penny for curation isn't much, but a penny times thousands times forty votes a day adds up to significant cash.
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just last week I saw someone offering up to 30k accounts for a dollar each..
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For sale: 70 mined Steem accounts loaded with 1.59M to 1.79M VESTS (currently equivalent to 358.8 to 403.7 Steem Power) each
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sale steemit accounts per 0.35$
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That's thirty five cents to buy an account. How many accounts does ten dollars buy? A hundred?
How hard is it to obtain a 'bot for each account? Not very hard.
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I made a curation bot for steem
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Bots and the Steemit Ecosystem
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Building Better Bots: Ranking the Top Curators
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Bot's don't curate, they 'process' the steem stream. I consider it to be a form of cheating.
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Steemit has over 105K accounts. Some have 'guesstimated' that 60% or more are 'bots. Is it any wonder that content creation is relatively low? Is it any wonder that 'users' come to steem, don't stay very long, then go?
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So what's the solution?
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I'll have my machine get with your machine.
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What need of people then? Why not just write a short post , it doesn't have to be a very good one
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then have thirty thousand of your bots upvote it?
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I dunno about other writers but I don't particularly care to write for robots. That's not writing that's wanking. Writing for (your own) robots might explain why a one sentence (REALLY STUPID) post get's a thousand votes. It's easy if you have a thousand thirty five cent accounts. Each of which vote forty times a day.
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It would seem to me that the solution is obvious.
CAPTCHA
It would seem to me that if CAPTCHA were required for every vote......
Require that every time a vote is cast the voter must first solve a CAPTCHA. That would prevent 'bots from voting
One Wonders Why That isn't happening?
Full Disclosure
I bought into CrowdSourceWhale when it first came out.
In fact I was the first 'investor'.
I thought about it a while.
Observed how it worked
Then I wrote this post.