Hey guys,

So this thing has been in my mind for a couple of days now and thought to make a post about it. Usually whenever people talk about 'Bots', there is always a debate on whether they are good for any platform like Scorum or not. If you ask for my personal opinion I will say they aren't good. So without further going round and round let me share my opinions about bots and why I consider them bad.

If you have been on the Steemit platform, compare what the platform was before and after the introduction of 'Bots'. As you all know it is worst right now. Comment spamming, bid-based upvoting, curation voting, welcoming bots there are various kinda bots over there. As its said, too much sugar can make the taste bitter. Same way too many bots is just not a good experience for users on the platform.

The bots can be divided according to me in two categories, 1. Profit bots and 2. Non-Profit bots. So what are these different kinda bots and how they differ.

  1. Profit Bots:

This category of bots includes, bid-bots, delegation based voting bots, upvote4upvote bots and others. Usually I refer to them as profit based because there is no intention of getting the quality to the platform. The sole intention is to make money on the post by giving some money. It can be considered like investing your money and getting an ROI on it. Which according to me isn't right.

The usual problems with this kind of bots is, to get higher ROI on their investments, the users have to make lot of post which can then be upvoted by the bots to gain some profit. So what eventually happens is the post turns shitty or plagiarized and the whole platform turns out to be really bad experience.

What started with a couple of bots on the steemit platform with the intention to help users gain attention by giving away some of the money holding they have, now turned into a profit based business. Yes I will call it a business, as it is solely run for profit. The bot runners intend to make money off of the bids and the bidders want to make money off of the bigger upvotes. Usually the ROI % is between 110%-180%. Now as you can see there is a whole big list of bots on steemit if you check on steembottracker.com.

So what does that have to do with the Scorum platform. As we all know Scorum is somewhat based on the logic of Steemit. So this post I made is just to share my opinion that the bots are not a good thing for the platform. It starts with one and then it increases exponentially. So my suggestion to all we should try to avoid going into the profit based bot categories.

2. Non-Profit Based bots:

This category of bots is somewhat not as bad as the profit based bots. This category involves bots like, welcoming bots, spam commenting bots, curation bots and others. I won't say all bots of these categories are good but a few like curation bots are good because they provide the limelight to the new users who are good bloggers who don't get much of the attention. But every coin has two sides. On one side there is curation bot than on the other we have comment spamming bots. These are the bots that usually comment on each and every post of yours like "Nice Post", "I like it", "Good work", etc., It just makes the post look worse and they do this in a hope that they will get upvote on their comment for that.

Same are the welcoming bots, they will comment each and every post in the introduce yourself tag. Than comes the 'Memo Bots', what they essentially do is send you a bare minimum amount and put their post link in the Memo field of the transaction. On Scorum I have found one who was trying to pull off the same stunt, but I am happy to say that community didn't appreciated that kind of behavior. The below picture shows the transaction of @lazyboss, a 'Memo' spammer.

So in my opinions "the bots aren't a good thing to the platform".

No matter what they do, whether curation or bid-based voting, I think our platform is better off without the bots. What makes Scorum different is that the post you see over here and the rewards they earn are all authentic, genuine users who read those post and appreciate it.

So wrapping up my short post, I will be happy to hear from you in comments below, why you consider bots a good/bad thing for the Scorum platform.