Now that is obviously an over simplification of the platform but this blog post if not about a Crypto-currency. The point I would like to focus on are the rewards that are given to the users. There are two ways to make money from content.
1: If you create a comment or post that someone likes they can up vote you, the up votes all have different values depending on how much stake that user has on the network. But for every person who up votes you who owns Steem, you make money.
2: If you up vote posts and they then become popular then you get rewarded for finding good content for the network.
Now there is an API for Steem that allows you to automate anything with the network. You can automatically post anything on the network using a bot, you can also up vote using a bot. If you can create an algorithm that finds good content that gets up voted you can constantly collect rewards from the network. But it is really hard to read a picture, link and text to identify if content is enjoyable.
This blog post looks at some of the most famous bots on the network. I will show a couple of examples from this blog post, but if you are interested there are some very cool stories and posts on this blog.
The algorithms can be very basic or very complex. Some will analyze which posts get up voted, see how long each post is and how many photos are included. Now scan the block chain to see similar posts with the same length and number of photos and up vote all of them!
Here is a bot that just monitors accounts and up votes every article the user posts. Another bot tries to catch plagiarism in posts and report them.
Now this might seem a little off from AI, and I agree. Creating a bot that just up votes something everyday or just uses pure randomness is not AI. But going back to our assignment in class, NLP, we would analyze text and identify if it is positive, negative or neutral and rank the statement. A good example of a bot that is doing this is this bot. The AI looks at posts and ranks them depending on several parameters mentioned in the post. I also believe that this space is very new considering Steemit was introduced in 2016. Machine learning and other AI could be used in this space to try to understand what people enjoy. Since everything is open sourced it makes it easy for developers to interact with the block chain and users to see how information is received by the community. We could use weights to identify if a certain length of article keeps the user engaged but not too short/long. We could weigh the number of photos or the topics that are presented in the post.
Now this sounds really interesting, thousands of posts a day, earning a millions of dollars, up votes small communities of great writers. But this creates a weird ecosystem. You start to have huge bots who are up voting content. These bots start deciding what content looks good and what you should see at the top page. If you start creating content you can target these bots to reward your content. If you understand the algorithm and exploit it you can get hundreds of bots to up vote every single piece of your content. People will start writing blog posts to appeal to bots instead of humans, and people are trying to upvote what bots will upvote. This system can get to a point where bots are just fighting with eachother over content and the enjoyment of humans is put on the back burner. YouTube uses similar practices, but they have an end quote of getting the most ads in front of you. These bots have an end goal of using the system to guess which post will be best. If they dominate the humans on this platform they could be the audience that we perform for to make Steem.
But the Steem community calls themselves the "Proof-of-brain" Crypto so perhaps this will never be the case. But it is a very interesting space to try to understand the content that will be produced and received by a bot community.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to encourage anyone to buy Steem, I just want to show some cool things that are happening in the space.
Sources:
Screenshot of steemit.com curtosy of Daniel Zwiener
Second photo is from bitcointalk.org or found at http://empowereddollar.com/wp-content/uploads/robot-accountant.jpg
What is to stop someone from making a bot that posts content, and several bots that own Steem and upvote the original bot's content? Would that not just inflate Steem as a currency and devalue the efforts of actual people and/or good bots?
ReplyDeleteGood question. Maybe they use CAPTCHAs or some other anti-bot screening technology on the forums to try to prevent automated posting?
DeleteYou have to have stake in the network to reward people and yourself. You may only make a fraction of a penny from someone who has $5 on the platform. But if someone who owns millions of steem upvotes you, you might just see yourself receiving $500 in one click.
DeleteYes steem is inflationary. It produces just under double what it's supply is currently each year. They counter this by using rewards for people who stake in the network using steem power, but this is getting into the more complicated side of Steem. I don't know if I like steem as a crypto, but I do think there are some really cool questions coming from it!
But right now there are groups of people who work in communities who vow to upvote each other regardless of content so long as they work together.
Also the Cheeta bot catches plagiarism, if you read that post they talk about screening posts to identify if the content is stolen. If so it flags the posts in hopes to remove bots and stolen content. An interesting thing that people have is taken facts or articles from open sourced websites that have APIs and just posted some information every 15 minutes or so.
DeleteBots could still produce spammy content that isn't stolen, and as long as the post-bot and upvote-bots all have stake, it would appear legitimate. It would be just like the people you describe- they don't need to make actually good content, their friends will just always upvote it. How do they prevent this with human users?
DeleteThey cannot prevent bots from posting content and upvoting themselves. That is why I thought it might create an interesting senario where bots are creating content for bots. I haven't stayed up-to-date with the latest changes, but this is one issue they wanted to handle in the past.
DeleteIn regards to our NLP assignment, I felt this article to be really interesting! Especially in regards to the crypto-bubble surrounding the world. I would be very interested in what applications this type of system could have in our society. I agree that this system would (and from what I understand, does) create a weird ecosystem based on a bot community.
ReplyDeleteThanks! I believe this platform is a really cool experiment if nothing else. There are no ads and no products to sell except your enjoyment. If bots become more prevalent in this system what kind of ramifications could that have for a social network? Facebook can control bots and bots have very clear purposes, to interact with users and manipulate the users into doing something. But Steem is a system where bots might be enjoying other bots content and curating content that's sole purpose is to be enjoyed by bots.
DeleteIs there a limited number of upvotes or a penalty for giving too many upvotes? I'm just wondering why user just don't create a bot that upvotes every single post regardless of content giving them a good chance that some of those posts will become popular and earn them money?
ReplyDeleteGreat question! So you get some power on the network, lets say 100% voting power every 12 hours. If you upvote just 1 post then that gives that post a lot of power. But if you vote more within that 12 hours it devalues that initial vote over time. It works along those lines with constantly adjusting values that the developers tweak to make the system work and not be easily exploitable.
DeleteThis is an interesting idea. We've already seen bots interacting with other bots on social media (like the subreddit for bots), but never in a way that carries monetary weight. It would be interesting to see a market dominated by bots. I wonder what the content would end up looking like. Would they learn to generate content based entirely on other bots' algorithms for upvoting? Would that just entail a bunch of positive/negative/strong words? Would those posts actually make any sense?
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of this and found this to be pretty mind blowing. I never imagined bots taking over an entire crypto-currency but I could definitely see it to be possible and probably very likely in this situation.
ReplyDeleteI think this is such a wasteful use of AI. We can be using AI to make our lives better and easier, instead we use technology to make bots that write posts and up vote people. Such a waste of resources.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I'm just not well versed in my Cryptocurrency, but how does the team behind this make money? It appears to me that they're giving money away, Crypto or not, and only getting traffic in return... ad revenue wouldn't really be able to return nearly as much as would be needed to break even, provided they're even using ads.
ReplyDelete