Copy-and-paste is the most potent bot in the world. Just a few lines of code to pass the Turing Test. Couple it up with a scramble bot and you'll get permutations of passable human-like content - at least in textform. I have seen this in Deloitte's financial reports. The bots are doing a pretty good job.
If you click right on the Steemit Beta icon on the top left side of the screen and view the "New" category, you will soon find a plethora of spammy posts. I can't explain the science, but suffice to say that our brains are good enough to smell bots.
But what if I'm a bot myself? Surely, rewards should be given if the content is valuable. The point here is really not to sideline the bots. Bots come in all shapes and sizes. You can think of apps as half-bots. I'm using Canva pretty often for fast decent designs, and I consider it to be some kind of semi-bot. It's valuable and it makes my life easier. Just a semantic thing going on here. Anyway..
Think of semi-objective proof-of-work is an augment to the human perception.
Augmented (subjective) proof-of-work.
Actually, it's already happening. The augmentation is coming from the users themselves. Like @pharesim. There seems to be a few simple bots lurking around making Steemit a better place. The bot owners should be rewarded, as long as the bots aren't adding to the nuisance. This is a very interesting frontier: problem-solving by open participation. I call this external augmentation.
One idea for external augmentation: Plagiarism bots. Not ironclad ones, but these bots should present its own findings, listing out links of highly similar contents for humanly verification. It cuts down time.
However, there are certain things that can only be done internally. Internal augmentation. One of it is the measurement of time and quantity of non-specific keystrokes. There should be some kind of correlation between those measurables and the complexity of content (assuming the Steemit platform provides tools and APIs for visual design, music, their favourite tools in general, etc in the future). There are a number of problems of course: some create fast, some slow. And what about genuine copy-and-paste jobs? Bots can even be made to copy-and-paste alphabet by alphabet to simulate genuine keystrokes.
There are really no perfect solutions to this at the time of writing, but at least flags can be presented to aid fellow curators. Perhaps it would even promote content creation via tools available on Steemit, and maybe even external tools may want to connect with Steemit because of its value.
And let's say Steemit comes up with a simple smart writing device like Freewrite, all hardwired for proof-of-work especially for Open Freelance Jobs @ Steemit if that's a thing in the future.. wouldn't that be awesome?
---kevinwong/[email protected]:unocero---