SteemIt Guide - On Bots
Let's face it. SteemIt.com suffers a serious infestation of bots.
SteemIt has an open API and actively encourages developers to create bots to serve the blockchain. Some of the bots are extremely helpful. For example the @cheetah checks new posts against web site archives and flags posts that copied content from other sites. Cheetah performs a valuable service that reduces the amount of plagiarism on the site.
There are other helpful bots that down vote phishing schemes and spammers. The SteemItBoard bot issues wonderful awards that show how accounts are progressing.
I confess, I ended up hiring @dustsweeper to handle my dust. @Dustsweeper upvotes posts on the fifth day if the total value of the votes is less than $0.02. This bot assures that I get the award that humans in the plankton intended to give me when they upvoted my post.
Unfortunately, there is a huge number of bots do nothing but harvest the reward pool for the bot builder. The people who build bots are willing to put a great deal of STEEM POWER behind their bots. The unfortunate result of these bots is that they greatly diminish the rewards pool.
If you look at the trending pages, you will see that the people who regularly show up on the pages have hired an army of well funded bots to upvote each of their posts.
The bot infestation is so severe that a large number of Steemians have left the platform because they feel that, as a limited human being, they cannot compete against an army of drones.
I've thought about different ways to battle the bot problem. It finally dawned on me: Bots have to operate by the same rule as humans. The influence of bots is limited by their STEEM POWER; so the best way to move the scales on SteemIt.com in favor of humans would be for humans to buy up STEEM POWER while the price of STEEM is under a buck. If ten thousand humans bought a hundred bucks worth of STEEM POWER then that action would shift things towards humans. These accounts are likely to upvote other humans and magnify the effect of the purchase.
Advertising for STEEM
Unfortunately, I don't have a hundred dollars. But I have advertising space. I would sell ads at the rate of 10,000 for one STEEM DOLLAR (or the current price of STEEM x 10,000. If the price of STEEM is $0.78 then you'd get 7800 ads for each STEEM. Ad Order Page.