Bots can be good

People these days have limited attention span, but they also give it to a very small number of sites. There are billions of web pages out there, but most of us pick a few that we go to each day. Same as with apps, it seems like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp own the attention of the most, with websites CNN, Netflix are disproportionally more read.

So when a young writer enters stage and creates 1 billionth and first blog, there is simply no audience in the sea of content. And guess who visits his blog, apart from his friends, who he begs to take a look? You got it: bots.

Bots these days are the most trending form of an app: Penny, KiK, Microsoft Bot Platform, Magic and the list goes on and on. Some people just know how to WhatsApp and now all they just want to talk to apps like they do to friends.

Now bots can do many things, and they have long been a part of our online live, in form of spam comments. So, logically there was invented a test to see if you’re a bot, it’s called CAPTCHA.

But not all bots are bad, and they don’t have to be bad. They have qualities that humans can’t match, like broad attention and speed. They are not afraid of hard work of leaving thousands and millions of comments on every site of the interwebs. These specifics positioned them well to get exploited by evil spammers for profits, and bots have earned bad press, and were eventually blocked.

Now let’s consider some good bots behaviour, like cheering up new writers, providing them with valuable feedback, growing the stats and the numbers, raising self esteem and pushing them to write better. Perhaps, more human readers could notice new writers that are commented a lot by bots.

Same goes for people with few friends on Facebook, introverts, depressed. Bots could fact-check your writing, add relevant links, heat the discussion, troll and adore.

Think about it, CAPTCHA will not stop bots (which now can well see and recognize numbers in a picture), instead it will raise questions among good bots, for why they aren’t welcome in the comment threads. The days Declaration of Bots Rights is discussed are not that far away.

Stop spam, not bots.