How NOT to STEEMit
Spam and Fake Content Accounts on STEEMit
One of the ways I like to find articles to read and upvote is to view the New thread and scan down through the posts to see if a headline or image catches my eye. When I don't see something after a while, I will click on some categories to find New articles. Usually, I can find at least 1 or 2 articles that deserve an upvote. Sometimes, I even find article I disagree with and I still do an upvote after making a comment. I figure, if the article was worth it, even if I disagreed with the author's position, it still deserves an upvote because someone else might enjoy reading the article or provide a comment.
Reading articles and providing feedback is what a social network is all about and since Steem and STEEMit has a goal to make a social network, I think that it is important to create this social network community.
A few weeks ago, while I was browsing the New articles, I got annoyed that I had to scan through articles that were obviously bot created. These articles were consolidation of Tweets or other social media postings. I created an article News SPAM Article : What is the point of these articles and why doesn't a bot hit them?. It really bugged me to see all of these articles.
These and the comment spam bots got me to the point that I started adding the following image to the bottom of each of my articles.
Right click and copy the image URL. Feel free to add it to the end of your articles.
Having no other recourse, other than to create my own super-bot that would down vote/flag these articles, I decided to Mute the author of these articles. Obviously, putting Mute on an author doesn't punish them, it only hides them from my view. I'm sure there is a way to see all the accounts that I have muted and share those with you, but I don't know how to do that now. Maybe I should have been a little more diligent and wrote down the account name before muting them, so I could publish a weekly list of accounts to Mute.
Anyway, beyond those annoying authors (probably was just one person with multiple accounts), I found more annoying authors of posts. I don't know if they are bots or not, but a lot of times they are posting the same "article". In this case, they post either a Top 10 Ways... or some other YouTube video. I've started muting those as well, when I look at their article list an only see the same type of articles.
These accounts are no better than the social news spam bots. They don't attempt to provide any original content and for the most part don't even provide additional text with the link to the videos.
If there was a STEEMit Board for disciplinary action, these accounts would be voted to oblivion, in my opinion.
You don't have to be a good writer and you don't have to provide interesting content to STEEMit, but you should try to provide something that is more than copying a URL and hitting Post.
On some of these accounts that I have muted, they don't even have 1 upvote. That means the bot that was setup didn't even do the automatic Upvote post action. What is the point of these accounts?
Anyway, enough of the rant for today. Maybe I will start compiling a list of accounts to mute, I don't know. Maybe I can find an easy way to check the blockchain for those accounts. I encourage you to mute these spam bot accounts as well, but I'm not sure if that will do any good.
Let the positive energy sing!
More Power to the Minnows!!
It's a problem, for sure, especially when they are trying to earn a quick buck from this system. Money issues, for sure! Not entirely sure how we will solve this problem (apart from flagging and reporting).
Some of the accounts aren't earning much at all, which makes it even more confusing. It's like the account owner put them on autopilot and thought that it would be an easy money maker.
There has to be something set to do community policing. And I'm not talking about more bots, like Cheetah. I think accounts should be reported and then a group of "real" people vote on if the account should be removed or not.
I will agree with you! I don't think that trying to use the bots as easy money is not on the minds of some.
Voting to block some accounts sound good, but who will do the policing? The community, I feel, has that power with flagging (though there's only so much you can do, you can flag all you want and that bot is still going to keep posting regardless of reputation)
Yup...the flag only works to hide, but eventually the account will be back. There would also have to be checks to see if the account was connected to another account. There are a few "investigators" on STEEMit, trying to track down scammers and such. But, it would seem that we need a community effort and more support from the Whales.
There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.
- Mahatma Gandhi
This shit right here. This needs to stop. I'm going to leave it up for anyone to see on this post for now.
I definitely agree with this sentiment. If steemit and the upvoting system is working as it should then the cream will rise to the top anyway. We should all feel free to post what we want but bot posting accounts are a pain in the arse for sure. :)
I totally agree with you that the Bots that publish content are a real rubbish.
The Bots to advertise the articles seem very helpful to me.
Give me an example of the "bots to advertise the articles"?
Are you talking about the bots that point out the top upvoted for a category? I think those are pointless as well.
Buildawhale, minnowbooster, etc.
These are the ones that I have been using.
These resteem ones haven't worked for me.
Upvote bots.
But, the question is, do they actually hurt the Rewards Pool and only help the bot owner?
Yes, upvote Bots sry.
Yes, they can hurt the reward pool, but how much? 1%, 5%? I don't know.
I think the upvote Bots also benefit the users.
They take the majority of the curation reward due to their upvote power on each post they upvote and they get more each time someone pays them to vote more.
This comment spam is terrible. They add some "great article" nonsense even to posts in the wrong language. It does take away the fun a bit and the same goes for the spam articles. It's not just video posters, but also these 1 picture without text articles of which most are annoyingly nonsensical. But then again, I don't think that they have much success with it. They rarely get an upvote, usually they get unfollowed or muted and at the end these posts end up in a void. Or don't they?
PS: Your idea with the no-bots image is not bad. Maybe it could be made a standard that if a specific tag or image or sentence is added, bots stay away from the comment section.
Ha! A #nobot tag.
I'm guessing there are too many upvote whales and such that wouldn't like that. And if it was that simple, the Powers That Be could just shut down the comment and article bots in the code.