The omnipresence of weenis: a tale of bots and bot-like creatures

Ah, @weenis . When I first received an upvote from you, it came with such a friendly (if brief) message that I felt compelled to give you an upvote in return, and promptly ventured forth to your own profile to do the neighbourly thing by checking out your posts. It was then I discovered the horrible truth - my new friend weenis was either a bot, or something much, much worse.

Not that, but close

I had fallen with a resounding splash into a veritable ocean of upvotes, comments, and replies, upon which sailed Captain Weenis, the greatest Steem-powered sailor who ever lived, traversing the vast oceans of Steemit with a seemingly endless cargo to be delivered. While struggling to stay afloat upon this raging tide, I noticed that occasionally he actually posted things, in frantic, garbled English that reminded me a bit of something a broken Chatbot might say if you tried to convince it of its own inhumanity. Things like:

"Im not bot...I be top guy! In history! Friend give list of enlgish encouragement!"

Right, weenis

While his (its?) conversational skills might be somewhat lacking, weenis is nonetheless an impressive achievement on the part of its creator. He (I'm gonna go ahead and give him a gender - you can thank me later, weenis) is literally everywhere, the first commenter on a great many posts (I expect I'll even get one from him on this post pretty much as soon as I hit the button), and is no doubt racking up a fortune in curation rewards. His comments are friendly, encouraging, and generally good enough to fool most people (myself included), and some even come with a free image or gif! They're even frequently self-edited - each time I go back to check on a post he's commented on, the comment and even the image/gif attached to it have changed!

A screenshot of my latest gif(t) from weenis

As generous as he is, there are some important questions we have to ask ourselves about the almighty weenis:

• Is he (along with other bots like him) winning at Steemit - and if so, is he cheating?
• Even if the answer to that question is yes, could he possibly be a good thing for the network by contributing votes and comments (even though what he's doing is seemingly automatic rather than actual curating)?
• And, perhaps most importantly, should bots like weenis be allowed to take advantage of the Steemit system? After all, if bots prove to be the most effective way of generating Steem Power for their creators, we're bound to see a lot more of them posting and curating in the future - which could possibly lead to the interesting and terrifying possibility of bots interacting with other bots. As a reminder of how creepy that can get, I give you the following conversation, comprised mostly of pure existential dread:

If bots turn out to be the most efficient Steemers, they're bound to take over the system at some point, which, to my mind, defeats its purpose entirely as a platform for the exchange of (human) thought. At the same time, though, they'll be pretty damn hard to detect and remove even if we as a community decide we don't want them.

Case in point

There is another, more disturbing possibility, however: that weenis is not a bot, but a human being who has become one. A rarely eating, barely sleeping, super-Steemer who trawls the network day and night voting and commenting away in an endless quest for the precious Steem.

Weenis...is that you?

If so, I salute you, weenis. Please don't murder me over the internet.