BEWARE - I'm FIGHTING Spam In My Comment Section From Now On
Yesterday, I posted what I consider to be a very important and relevant video regarding the future of art and what sacred liturgical art may play in the renewal of what is otherwise a chaotic and irrelevant mess.
I was excited to share that post on Facebook...but then the comments came and it was so blatant that either people:
- Didn't watch the video
- Didn't know what I was talking about
- Was just there to either upvote themselves or hope for me to upvote them
90% of the comment was just pure noise.
Starting Now, I Will Flag Spam Comments Under My Articles
A comment section is a place where we can have an intelligent conversation about the topic of the article. But when you have to sift through dozens of irrelevant and shallow comments, the experience (both for me or my readers) is diminished.
Spam comment is bad for everyone. It's bad for me who is trying to have a conversation with my readers, it's bad for my readers who try to find something interesting in the comment section and it's bad for people outside of steemit who are just discovering Steem for the first time. I am done enabling that kind of behavior on my blog...and I invite other people to join me in fighting that problem under their own articles...because I'm not going to start policing other people's article.
The Type of Comments I Will Flag
1- The "What The Heck Are You Talking About?" Comment...
You know those comments that looks like someone through random words together...or just post a random gif. Here is a few examples from yesterday:
interesting contests to follow,what about the theme, whether one day one theme such as
colorchallenge, thanks.
or this masterpiece:
If I can't understand what you are saying or actually doesn't mean anything. I will flag.
2. The "Did you just copy wikipedia for no reason?" Comment
Here is a comment that add nothing to the conversation, doesn't provide insights or even attempt at making it relevant:
While media attention was focused on the sale of a rare Leonardo da Vinci painting, a piece of modern art being derisively described as “ketchup on canvas” just sold for nearly $50 million dollars. During an auction at Christie’s in New York de Vinci’s 500-year-old “Christ as Salvator Mundi” ended up selling for a whopping $450 million dollars, more than four times its estimated price. However, another piece of “art,” appropriately titled Untitled, was bought for $46,437,500. As you can see, it resembles what would probably happen if a 2-year-old toddler was left on its own with a bottle of ketchup.”
If you write noise in the comment section, I WILL FLAG.
3. The "You didn't read the article or watched the video" Comment
Christian art is sacred art which uses themes and imagery from Christianity. ref:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_art like you said When everything can be art then nothing is...really
if we say it's an art, everything can be arts. different groups of christians use some extent of arts, symbols & forms. i think it's the true knowledge of art. impressive article & added the video to do list of today. excellent article
@cryptoctopus
Here is a comment that prove that the person didn't watch the video but pretended that he had. It's just a bunch of words made to kind of sound on topic without addressing the topic or engaging with the content.
If I know you didn't read the article yet pretend that you did, I WILL FLAG.
4. The "I'm flattering you in hope that you will upvote me" Comment
You know who you are. Stop calling me "boss" or "sir". I don't care for flattery and it doesn't actually create an interesting conversation to begin with.
How Much Will I Flag and What I Will Do To Good Comments
I will be manually curating my comment section starting now. I will engage and converse with people with who I can have a fruitful conversation...whether or not they agree with me. For those few people, they can expect even bigger votes than before.
For those spamming my comment section, I will not pull any punches. Even if I flag you at 1%, it 1% of 360,000 Steem Power...I might flag at more than 1% if I am in the bad mood.
Conclusion
Write good engaging comments that I want to reply to: Get upvoted!!!
Write noise: Feel My WRATH!!!
Wow, @cryptoctopus ! Such lovely photographs of nature and a fine introductory post you have. I am illuminated about the issue of spam and I commend you. This is one of the most rewarded posts of the day. Blessings be upon you. Please upvote my blog (link).
(Sorry, I had to do it. I hope the spammers read your post. They irritate all of us.)
I am very sure the spammers have not read this and its why they keep spamming!
Iam now stressing this commenting thing in my community,but some guys just don't learn however much i keep singing about commenting!!!
You know my pains like you could read a page of my journal.
Geeks and blessings doesn’t really work that well. I don’t even think they know what that is. Since most Steemit early adopters now are mostly geeks. Should be more like may code be upon you. Oh boy some of these Steemit accounts it’s hard to tell if it’s a human or a Bot behind them. Very easy to get fooled. Steemit really needs some verify system that makes it easier to separate the Bots from real humans.
HAHAHAHA Now they made me laugh both @donkeypong and @cryptoctopus
But seriously it shows that they did not even read the post to which they respond. Show that you are not interested in understanding Steemit's dynamics. And it shows that you try to abuse the system for your own selfish benefit. Greetings from Venezuela
Dang! You beat me to it! hahaha
I Flagged you because you flagged me on a post which was like by author himself
I am sorry that i had to do that if you don’t do that I will also don’t
Revenge flagging is not a good idea. It will only make people angry. If you don't think my post is valuable then it is completely fine for you to downvote it. It's nothing personal, I downvote a lot of people who make useless comments. Yours looked to me like it was from a robot. If you don't have something to add to the discussion, it's best to just upvote the post and not comment. Hope this helps.
okay brother sorry that I did that I am removing my flag but you should take care as my comment was value able thats why smartwallet upvoted that.
Ultimately, this is the only approach that will really work around here. We all have to take appropriate steps to keep our own conversation spaces worth engaging in. Decentralization is the key.
I'm often surprised how valuable the conversation space is on my blog because I've been doing a version of this for quite some time. I often take a screenshot of someone's comments page in my reply as I flag them so everyone can easily see, at a glance, how spammy the commenter is. If more people downvoted ("flagged") then it wouldn't be considered such a taboo and more people would then do it (even though it costs them voting strength). I highly value my voting strength because there are a lot of great content creators here I support, but I still downvote as needed to protect my overall investment and the quality of the ecosystem.
So how about we also start flagging automated bot comments? I'm getting sick of seeing a bunch of comments on a promoted post which are just spam advertising for some bot voting campaign. Let's all send a message to bot owners that we don't care about their spammy comments and they need to find other ways to advertise (and NO, I don't mean use the memo field in transfers).
Ultimately it's a popularity contest, with those who are least popular aspiring to reach the lofty heights of you guys. It's human nature to want to be liked, upvoted, retweeted or whatever the digital platform trend of the day is. Having said this quality content needs to be promoted for this platform to reach its possible potential. Some of us also just wanna be 'social' and have some fun along the way? As a wise fictional character once said, with great power comes great responsibility :) Be happy & smile often my friends :)
very good points. Thanks @lukestokes, i'm glad to hear that I'm not alone having enough with this. I think the spam comment is at a point where new users notice and make them doubt in the viability of the platform.
Currently flagging is more hidden away. Had to Google search for it and I didn’t even find an article showing how to do it. This is also a big reason why people don’t do it since majority barely know you could flag bot automated comments.
Also it looks like it can be a bit risky to start to flag stuff how it may eventually get yourself in trouble. Especially since we are used to the big dictators over at other platforms how they treat you if you speak up.
Since it’s not just a red downvote symbol but a scary flag. But you said a good thing that it’s needed to keep up the quality of the ecosystem since we are all now invested in the Steem Blockchain and it’s in our best interest to keep this place being run well. But if they would tone down the scariness of the red flag I think more people would report stuff.
There has been an on-going discussion with Steemit inc about putting the downvote back as a downvote instead of a flag. It's tricky. But yes, there are still massive whales here who start flag wars and will make every post or comment hidden for someone they don't like if they so choose. It's a tricky thing. When it comes to flagging spam, I think the chance of a flag war is small. If you have concerns, you could also report the account in steemit chat instead of flagging it yourself.
As for the flag being hard to find, that's surprising to hear. It seems pretty straightforward to me.
Good idea! I stopped using up vote bots because of this😏
It's a bittersweet pill to swallow, especially if you're a new content creator that isn't bringing an audience from another platform. I recently saw three comments on my review regarding a some faucets I was using for a month and I got excited. When I actually saw what they said it just left disappointment from a lack of possible tips and elaborations.
The comments I received were:
"Nice post."
"Great posts. Now look at my referral links!"
"Just followed you, do the same please"
What really bothers me is that it's so simple to show you're engaged. Asking questions, adding insight and short stories about similarities between your experience and the poster's isn't that much harder than a generic copy and paste comment.
Honestly they need to just show the author that they took more time actually looking at the content itself, than looking at the reputation score and then their wallet balance before they comment and they would be fine.
It takes a lot to make people realize that you no longer need that poverty mindset anymore. We are creating abundance here. You just need to spend some real attention on a comment / blog post before you send it away to the cloud. Attention and Time is real value in this economy. And we all have it! We should spend it more wisely.
Can we pull people up? Yes but it will probably take many years before we see it happen on a larger mainstream scale. But it’s starting to happen which is very exciting. Clearly most spam comments isn’t even real humans but just Bot accounts. But when we see a human spend real Time and Attention creating value then we truly want to reward that since it has real value!
I actually saw an example of this on a comment chain. There was a person who made a bot that had a format of: emojis and two phrases telling the poster that they made a great post. However, he messed up somewhere and the emojis became numbers and signs instead which led him to be called out.
He actually replied, stating that he was unsure of how steemit worked and how he could get content out that would attract a lot of likes. He decided instead to flood posts with as many of these generic posts as possible and even had a separate account to like them. The poster decided to say that he could post about programming and his interests and eventually like-minded people will come and his standing would be in a much better position.
I believe if we could at least find a way to introduce a PSA upon a new signup, one that tells people that it's ok and expected to have a hard time gaining worthwhile earnings without a previous audience because organic growth doesn't come early because most of the high profile accounts I've seen have been here for a couple of months and most of the bots and users who spam have only been here for a few weeks.
Great comment. Also think it would be good to implement some tutorial for how to write proper engaging comments. Something that is above the 1-2 line comments that adds 0 value. People are not fully aware of how much value that could be gained with proper comments.
I’m really hyped about the new Communities feature that they will launch in the future that will make it easier to connect with like minded people and reward content easier in the same specific niche. Since everyone then could feed faster on each others energy!
Would say it’s not that hard to start earning on Steemit if you connect with others. But people get used to new levels of abundance fast and wonder what’s next.
But earnings while connecting with others every time someone rewards you the likelihood that they will do it again increases. If you keep add value that will say. Until it becomes a automated habit.
I have noticed the comments that you allude to. Naturally, they appear to be getting worse.
The most perplexing are the ones that come from, as you say, Wikipedia. I actually give them credit for being novel in that regard, I would never have thought of that. For the first couple times, I even upvoted some of them...until I saw it over and over.
I commend you for the intention to flag those who are spamming your comment section. The sad reality is, will it really do any good? From what I understand many of the "great post. thank you..resteemed" nonsense are just bots. After that, the copy/paste from Wikipedia I doubt will even notice....they throw up their post and move on.
Granted it will make your comment section a bit easier to scroll through with that stuff faded out. Nevertheless, I noticed those post and go so flagging them only might use up your SP.
But worth a shot.
The Wikipedia bot/human sounds hilarious. At least the first couple of times.. Haven’t gotten that one yet only the “nice post” comments still. I guess they come when you hit it big. Yes that is actually kind of creative compared to the same old predictable ones.
I think flag or just raise awareness will do some good since it will start a larger discussion about how you could solve the low quality comment issue. Think a solution will come eventually especially when we consider all the hard problems the Blockchain has already solved with math. This should be no issue in the future when we come together to experiment and find a solution!
When someone is using an aggressive tactic like using bots any little resistance we could put up is good. Because that will make them be aware that there are limits on what you could do.
The scroll in the comment section speaking about that I think the website needs to look over that a bit since I noticed some real lag when there are super many comments. This is both on mobile and desktop.
I dont believe the WIkipedia posters are bots....but they are annoying. Every post they put something up that at first looks well written...yet after a while you notice it is too well written.
And yes I get a ton of the nice post resteem stuff.
Yes they don’t fit into the world that we want to create. Every second they take in attention from us we find annoying. Whatever steals time and attention needs to be solved so we could move faster into a better world with more value.
A comment form that has somewhat alarmed me is the plagiarising of another comment while rewording it. For example:
A type of post that has given me pause is the copying of other posts using different phrases.
I don't see this a lot, but there are enough comments like that I do see (and I know I'm not seeing even very many of them) that there must be a particular automated, or standard method, for doing it.
Thanks!
I agree that Spam in the comment section of Steemit is incredibly annoying. So I am very interesting to see if flagging spam in your posts will decrease the amount of Spam you will get in the Future. Currently i have the feeling that flagging is only a waste of voting power and does not really reduce the amount of Spam because there is just too much of it.
That's possible and we will see how it goes. I think that if I keep to my own blogpost, I will clean up my corner of steem. Maybe if more people do this, the message will be clear across the board "as a culture". Since I have 360,000 SP + a reputation fo 73, that should be enough of a deterrent. But let's ee.
I think you're right. It's not necessarily a total waste of voting power because if people get burned more than once, they will probably learn not to do it again. At least in your corner of steem, like you said. Like when you're a kid and you burn your hand on the stove so you remember to never do it again.
Sometimes I can't tell if people are spamming or if they are just from another country and their English isn't that great. Those ones I feel kind of bad for, because I feel like maybe they tried really hard to make their English make sense, but it just doesn't.
I'm sure after a little more time on here, though, I will be able to tell the difference.
It's nice of you to at least warn people about it so they have a chance to change without getting "punished" per say.
Good point. Also, people from many non-english speaking countries have a very different idea of social media so there might be friction there. But hopefully, they will organize themselves like the Korean did with #kr and the french with #fr so that they can converse in their own language.
Funny you said that, I had the same thought before! But then I thought "what if they're from some third world place where hardly anyone has access to internet and they can't form a big enough group?" And then I thought"at least they're not cat-fishing." But you make a good point. Who knows.
ENGLISH: Hi, @Cryptoctopus I was flaged for you. That action lowers my self-esteem. I wrote you a comment in good faith. When I saw that, I did not know why. And I think I came to the conclusion that it was because I wrote badly, because I saw the video and I understood the post's message. I have been studying English for 2 years and since I came to Steemit it has helped me a lot to learn the language. What happened is scary to continue commenting because I am aware that my English is not all good yet. If this was annoying for you I apologize. Here I have an invoice from my student at the "Welcome" institute to certify this. See you. Hugs.
SPANISH: Hola @Cryptoctopus. Fui flageado por ti. Esa acción me bajo la autoestima. Te escribí un comentario con buena fe. Cuando vi eso, no supe porque. Y creo que llegue a la conclusión que fue por escribir mal, porque vi el vídeo y entendí el mensaje del post. Estoy estudiando ingles hace 2 años y desde que llegue a Steemit me sirvió mucho para aprender el idioma. Esto que paso me da miedo a seguir comentando porque soy consciente que mi ingles no es del todo bueno aun. Si esto fue molesto para ti te pido perdón. Aquí tengo una factura de mi cursado en el instituto "Welcome" para certificar esto. Me despido. Abrazos.
One thing I note regarding such spam is that it is generally from newer users, of which there are evergrowing numbers. While burning your hand on the stove if informative, it is also instructive to note that such burning is not informative to folks that didn't see it, or do it themselves.
With a tsunami of new users, I fear the flaghammer may prove necessary to wield forever. However, insofar as it is informative to each spammer on each post, I will hope that it has a salutary effect that benefits the community.
I also hope that it doesn't discourage too many newbs that just don't know better, or whose English hasn't reached a point where they're capable of knowing better, as it seems to have @hestiafull.
Thank you man. I hope that flag does not affect my reputation. What do you think?.
The affect on your reputation is immediate. It did affect your reputation, but little enough if you note no numerical difference.
You're good, my friend!
Thank you very much friend. I was a little worried. Because it was not with bad intentions.
Same! Hope it didn't discourage, which is why I think a warning would be nice first. I hope also that people don't get flagged for not having perfect English
Why does the reputation score matter when flagging? I understand the % of voting power * SP will lower the posts rewards by that amount. With so many different factors in Steemit it becomes confusing sometimes.
Anyway glad to hear more people are taking the spam seriously and hopefully a system is put in place that makes it more automated.
Their reputation will also be affected.
Does reputation have any direct effect on the reward payments? Or just the fact that it makes your look good or bad to the community?
I don't remember the post, but someone did a study on reputation and post rewards. While it might not have a direct impact on post rewards once you hit a reputation above 60 your rewards from posts really start to grow.
It may just be time on platform, but the graph that was provided was pretty convincing.
I will search for the post. Thanks.
thanks @valued-customer for the shout out.
I think this might be the article @slider2990
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/what-you-need-to-know-about-post-payout-correlation-steemit-business-intelligence
I believe it was a post by @paulag, and within the last month, IIRC.
Hope that helps!
When I flag spam, unless it is particularly offensive, I do so at a small percentage just to make it less visible.
I don't think it will have a big impact but it's worth doing just to tidy up the comments section. If you have a lot of SP it won't take a big vote to hide a comment.
@tonimontana thanks a lot on ur comment, cose u are making a point on @cryptoctopus writing, most ppl just want to be the first to comment, without taking their time to read through to enable them know what to reply. It always painful to see off comment. Thanks for this and i wish this message u drop with us will enable them know what is need doing well. @cryptoctopus.
It’s so damn stupid ! I get mad sometimes and spam them too because
So you’re 100% correct for spamming nonsense . People crave attention the wrong way. Bad comments shouldn’t ever be rewarded
Yeah, I hate when that happens! I had articles on which I have worked over 4 hours to collect accurate data/write/format properly, you know that articles of which you are proud you have written, and then see some guys (bots?) who comment on them within less than a minute from posting it...
It amazes me that these people actually think that these crappy generic comments are actually an effective way of earning money on Steemit. As if anyone with the capability of accumulating SP is going to be stupid enough to not realise it's a spam comment...
I suspect a lot of refugees from other platforms simply migrate what worked there. There is definitely a difference between how Steemit works and how Insta, Fakebook, and Twatter do.
There's a learning curve, and some people find it steeper than others.
It does not only happen to big users, it happens to small users as well. Recently I have been getting some of those bot-like comments.
I saw an user that have a fun way of dealing with it, because for every "I like your post" comment, this user replied with "I like your comment" hahahaha it made my laugh when I saw that.
Still, before flagging I think we should check how old is the user, I mean, if the user is totally new, then I think the best would be to leave a reply explaining the need to change the behavior. But if the user has several weeks already, and still is doing this type of things, then I think a flag will be fair.
I think I will flag and leave the link to this post. Once should be enough for someone to get he message.
Its a great idea indeed to check how old the user is on Steemit,but again even if they are 2 weeks or new,they need to read more about the platform before making those "nice post " comments.
I have realised that its just greed that makes people leave those generic comments in the hope of an upvote.
If more whales clean up their comment sections,we shall start enjoying Steemit hehehe.
I think my favorite spam comments are the ones that you have to read about ten times to try and understand, to see if they were actually trying to weigh in on the topic at hand, and just hoping that English wasn't their second language.. but after rereading it ten times and looking at their other comments you find out they're just writing confusing crap all over. It's like annoying detective work, ha.
I've personally only flagged one person, when they put up a link to a fake Steemit site trying to steal people's passwords. Out of curiosity, if you flag someone at 1% (so utilizing 3,600 SP) that only affects their reputation, correct? So if you flagged someone who has a higher reputation it would barely affect them, but if someone had a brand new account it would basically wreck them, right? Thank you for your time, boss sir. ;)
Users are increasing day by day on steemit so that number of spams and spammers are also increasing with it. We need to take hard action against it . Most of spammers increasing because some whales and dolphin upvote without reading comment. If only valuable comment or post related comment is rewarded than spammers will automatically stop spamming because they can't get anything with this. This is good decision it will remove garbage from your comment section.
I like this "Enter at your own peril" approach to your comment section. It's about time someone puts a stop to this endless mindless comments spam!
