Everyone knows that bounty campaigns attracting a lot of participants nowadays . But are they genuine , or just a part of automated process ? Investigation in this thread :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4139632.msg38185053#msg38185053 , where one person appear to be linked with 133 twitter accounts inspired me for some reflections .
Most part of bounty hunters at least once in their life saw that some users posting their reports in bounty thread when it already closed for a months (manager already announced the end of campaign with a bold red) . I saw it a lot of times and always thought that those guys are just stupid . But now I realise that they are very clever
, because they use automatisation of work process ,they just simply forgot to turn off bot on a certain campaign .
For example , take a look on campaign where all weekly report system provided through weekly proof-of-work forms :
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3332920.0 , it have only 500 twitter participants
, which is extemely low nowadays . On the other hand , look at example #2 , which is a standart , weekly thread post report-based:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3115745.0 ,
that have more then 6k twitter participants !
For me , it seems like bots can't fill up a proof of work forms , this is a reason why such type of campaigns "not popular" . So , to defeat bounty farming with bot-accounts we need to switch standart thread report rule to more progressive - proof-of-work forms . It will decrease the amount of fake accounts in social media bounties for a half , or even more in some cases (for some bounty managers) .
To exclude adapting bots to proof of work forms , bounty managers can slightly modify it for every new week . For example , we have a standart form: 1st enrty - email 2) bct acc name 3) bct acc link 4)spreadsheet number 5)report links 6) etc. , for the next week it will look like : 1)email 2) bct acc link 3) bct acc name and etc . , so it could be randomly modified for every next week to avoid any possible bot adaptation .
You can ask me :" who cares about bounty participants ? it doesn't matter who make posts and reposts in social media " , but you are not right . The goal of any project and their bounty is to grow their community , which will hold their tokens , take a part in their decisions by voting and continue to promote even after bounty ends . But all of this is not possible if real community doesn't exists . Let's say the total amount of bounty participants in certain campaign is 10000 people . Developers could be happy , that their project attracts so much people , isn't it ? But the truth is that at least 5000 of them are bots , thus they are not a part of community and will not take a part in further projects life .
In addition , they will cause a dump effect when token will be listed on exchange , because , let's say , a half of social media bounty pool is spreaded between one or few users , who own the army of bot accounts and thus , will earn a decent amount of tokens when bounty ends . And this is who will dump price on exchange because he can do that , while regular bounty hunters with a few tokens per person can't affect price in anyway.
Of course , I understand that this proposition will not receive support from a most part of bounty managers , for some reasons : some of them are to lazy , while another part could use bots by themselves . Anyway I need to try to bring my thoughts that the solution to defeat bot-accounts exists . I know that some managers are already working with proof of work forms and they doing great , but I really think if all managers will do the same it will help to make bounty industry better . I hope some bounty managers will see this thread and will change the way of how they accepting reports in order to make advertising more effective and thus , to increase proftits for projects who hired them and genuine bounty participants .
