Is Reddit Being Overtaken By Bots? Could Steemit Go The Same Way?

Didn't he look happy before the bots got to him?

Bots are becoming a hot topic on Steemit, with opinions mixed. Reddit appears to be in the later stages of a similar situation.

I still stay apprised of Reddit to help with gauging sentiment on my speculative crypto purchases. Some of the alt coins have solid communities on Reddit, and the trader subreddits can be quite useful.

The fact is, there are now so many bots on Reddit that the community has created a bot to...rate all the other bots.

Friends don't let friends go to r/Bitcoin.

This has been going on long enough for them to have almost 100,000 data points charted.

Bad-bot votes appear to be outnumbered by Good-bot votes approximately 5 to 1.

Back on Steemit, I'm noticing increasing discussion about bots. This is probably to be expected, as more and more bots come online.

Some bots take after the original wang-bot, and are rather universally reviled:

...or wear out their welcome very quickly:

Actually, this could be a human.

I would say those in favor of bots, or neutral enough not to care much, are generally in the numerical majority. Certain bots have very faithful followings, such as Randowhale, particularly in the minnow community.

However, those against bots tend to be much more vehement in their positions, creating a countervailing effect in public sentiment. They comment more frequently, and thoroughly, on the topic.

Comments such as these have been increasing on my blog, as of late:

It's not impossible to see both sides of this issue, either. Allow me to explain.

Recently, I saw a post for a new bidbot for Steemit; which bot is immaterial. The interesting thing was that of the 22 comments, 13 were notifications by bots, which is roughly 60%.

I promise that this incredibly large picture I edited to demonstrate the position of the anti-botters was less fun for me to create than it will be for you to scroll past:

Identifying information removed to protect the actually-innocent.

These users are doing nothing wrong, and this account in particular was brand new and was advertising a service.

This is merely an example of what some people refer to as "bot-spam". Often, these bot votes are cast by other users and not solely the author, which gives them a "tipping" function. Whether any individual use of a bot is adding or detracting from the community at any given time depends not only on the specific use-case, but also the individual's philosophy on automation in general.

The truth is that we all benefit from huge amounts of machine automation every day, merely by virtue of even working on a computer or mobile device. We all must be open to at least some degree of machine automation, lest we hold back progress. But is there a point that is too much, and how do we know when we get there?

I'd like to be clear in saying I am relatively neutral on this topic. I would prefer engagement to remain mostly human, but I'm not convinced that most bots detract from that outcome as of yet.

However, sometimes it does feel as if we've tumbled down the rabbit-hole when large swaths of comments are actually just bots, replying to other bots.

Like, am I really here, man? Or am I locked inside of a Chinese room?

Sources: Reddit, Google, Wikipedia, Thomas Cole "The Course Of Empire", r/btc
Copyright: TV Tropes, Terminator 1 & 2, GettyImages.com, http://cse3521.artifice.cc/chinese-room.html, Hackernoon.com, TechCrunch.com