I've been thinking about this some more. A couple additional thoughts:
- I'd definitely prefer to see the bots repurposed to add value to the social ecosystem instead of just reducing the visibility of reward extraction. But... making the reward extraction less visible, as you suggest, is definitely the path of least resistance. Also, maybe it could be step 1 towards a Gen-5 bot that is actually beneficial to the social community as well as its investors.
- Given that this basically just amounts to "proof of stake" mining, there's really no technical need to even involve the Gen-4 bots at all.
- Instead, it's functionally equivalent if we just say - as a community - anyone may use tags x, y, and z for automated self-votes, and the abuse detectives will leave you alone. However, you must: (i) stay far far far down on the trending page; (ii) not pollute any tags or communities where people look for authentic content; and (iii) not post plagiarized or illegal content.
- Then, individuals could do this on their own and wouldn't have to share a cut with the bot owners. If the bots want to survive, they need to give people a reason to use their service that isn't just delegated self-voting.
- At that point, we just have a competition between "proof of stake" in some agreed tags/communities, and content producers on the rest, and the "proof of stake" content would stop driving away the audiences that content producers depend upon.
It's a big paradigm shift, but might be worth considering... Maybe Steemit and abuse detectives could try it out for a 3 or 6 month experiment and see how it goes.
You're right, when I was thinking about how to make bots at least a little bit less harmful, I was starting from the current conditions where almost no changes are happening. I was looking for the easiest and, accordingly, the most real mechanism.
Your proposal is more thoughtful, it is more perfect, but it is much more difficult to implement.
I also like @michelangelo3's suggestion in this post. It would be great if Steem could implement something like AutoEarnings, when the investor would receive his annual interest and at the same time he would not need to trash the blockchain. Then there would be no need for voting services. In this case, the investor would "lock" his SP for high annual interest.
If today's voting services were to die, they would pave the way for a whole new generation of bots, ones that would bring value to the blockchain.
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