Diary of a Homicidal Steem Bot

Once upon a time, July last year to be slightly more precise, Muxxy wanted to get one over on @swelker101 - henceforth referred to as Shane. You see, Shane had created a little Steem bot that would give out little upvotes he referred to as Shane hugs from the @msp-shanehug bot. People would delegate to the bot and its voting power would slowly increase, adding a little happiness to the rewards on Steemians' posts.

Never one to let someone else's idea go to waste, Muxxy decided to copy improve on the premise and set forth plans to bring Muxxybot into the world. For minutes he tinkered with the same code Shane did to create his bot. Bored, he gave up on the idea.

Instead, what he devised was a human curation team that worked in the background, finding little gems of posts from minnows which Muxxybot would then compile into regular posts, upvoting the authors and giving them further exposure. Like the hugbot previously mentioned, Muxxy would call for delegations to improve Muxxybot's voting power to better reward these worthy authors.

Muxxy was totally oblivious to the wrong connotations that another bot to the network would bring, to the detriment of the project. Many Steemians were firmly anti-bots and here he was pronouncing a new one! Ignorant of the fact, he ploughed on with his creation.

Muxxybot would have a personality, something Muxxy could sink himself into when producing the curation posts. This bot was to be very anti-human - a sad twist on the anti-bot feelings permeating the Steem ecosystem. Muxxybot was to be so full of sarcasm as to make readers pass by his posts. The exact opposite happened. Humans are strange, as Muxxybot would say.

Muxxy relished writing these posts, he enjoyed getting into the Muxxybot character and turning his snark on. He treated it as a release from being nice to everyone. The writing style was obviously different, written in code...

...... something like this ......
To seal the deal, Muxxy contacted an awesome artist called @overkillcoin who designed the graphic at the top of this post. Although not looking as evil as Muxxy might have wished, he was very happy with the design.

Next, Muxxy turned it up to eleven: not only was Muxxybot to hate humans, but he would use his curation efforts as a means to somehow destroying humanity, slowly growing in strength from delegations and rewards on the posts. The readers appeared to lap this up.

But then Muxxy had a change of mind. By now he had a solid crew of upwards of twenty curators, bringing in worthy shareable posts. Where he began curating general posts three days a week, Muxxybot began curating poetry only on a Tuesday, fiction on a Thursday and, in an effort to help the French community, French language posts on a Saturday. Three days suddenly turned into six.

Although Muxxybot tolerated his curators - which he called minions - he had little desire to see their efforts rewarded. His master however thought differently. What he decided to do was to split the SBD earned from the curation posts equally among the curators that featured in that post.

Muxxybot didn't like this change as it interfered with his plans for human domination, less of the power of the account being used to boost his evil. I'd like to say that Muxxybot got out of control, something akin to Skynet in the Terminator series of films, wreaking havoc and destroying entire populations. The truth is less impressive.

A few months ago there was a dearth of suitable content to share. The Muxxybot minions struggled to find curatable content. We dropped down the number of days we posted to account for this. It helped little. On top of this, Muxxy became extremely busy being a moderator at @minnowsupport, a curator for @OCD and running his own writers' community, @thewritersblock. Despite a lot of support and help from @bex-dk and @tinypaleokitchen, who took over posting the curation posts a few days a week, the project looked like it was dying.

Last month Muxxy announced that Muxxybot was to shut down. He was genuinely moved as he wrote the last post by Muxxybot, as were some of the minions. As hinted in his last communique, Muxxybot's memory modules were transferred to The Writers' Block Discord server where he still lives on, welcoming newcomers to the welcome-center in his usual sarcastic and brash manner. He eats dropped links and tells off the human perpetrators.

Huge thanks to @jasonbu for capturing the essence of Muxxybot in our Discord bot.

It's good to know Muxxybot hasn't forgotten his roots...

I don't usually write about myself in the third person, but this has been fun. Ten months living as a maniacal human-hating bot was very enjoyable. I was and am still sad that the operation had to shut down when it did, but I am forever thankful to the curators that helped make the project so much fun.

Will Muxxybot ever return? Who knows. Currently, I am far too busy to even consider it, but maybe one day - when I have enough SP to throw at the account. As much as I enjoyed being a sadistic bot, I enjoyed helping out minnows in what small way I could, and that was the real fun behind the Muxxybot project.

Putting aside the idea of reviving the project, do you have any suggestions what I should do with the account? I'd be interested in hearing your opinions down below.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://www.muxxy.co.uk/2018/06/13/diary-of-a-homicidal-steem-bot/

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