Guess: Legit or Scam?

Last night I was up writing and just before bed, went through my feed. I came across a post of my brother ( @galenkp ) and a comment from @m31 asking him to check a previous comment she had left on an older post. I went to that post and it was a comment about curation and exposure for @ocd, an initiative to manually curate quality content and help lower-rewarded, quality providers get exposure.

From @m31:

This gem of a post was discovered by the OCD Team!

Reply to this comment if you accept, and are willing to let us share your gem of a post! By accepting this, you have a chance to receive extra rewards and one of your photos in this article may be used in our compilation post!

You can follow @ocd – learn more about the project and see other Gems! We strive for transparency.

If you would like your posts to be resteemed by @ocd and reach a bigger audience, use the tag #ocd-resteem, it doesn´t have to be the first one. Every day, three posts using this tag will be chosen by our curators to be RS. Good Luck!

I sent a message to my brother telling him just in case he hadn't seen it and he replied, 'Oh, I thought it was a scam'. He then replied to the comment giving his approval.

The issue is that he has received so many spam and scam comments over the few months he has been at Steemit that he has started mentally filtering offers and turning a blind eye. This has happened before in history.

For those that are old enough to remember the start of advertising on the internet, the sides of the core content were plastered with all kinds of adverts that flashed and blinked (often in unison) to try to attract viewers to click. Through experience though, most that clicked through found trash and pretty soon, started ignoring the adverts completely. The users eyes no longer strayed to the side and no longer was attracted by the flashing, epileptic fit-inducing nonsense.

This is happening at Steemit with comments. There is so much automated content, so much spam, cut and paste and scam messages offering this and that, many users no longer know which is legit and which is shit.

The problem is that to know which it is takes investment, perhaps not much like the one from @ocd which requires a click and some reading but, once bitten, twice shy comes into effect. There is a lot more nonsense than legit and even though the real ones are increasing slowly, they are being buried.

People, (especially the new members) have clicked through so many links only to find untrustworthy or valueless offers that something like the curation and resteem exposure of @ocd gets grouped into the same category. Unless someone has come across it before they are likely to filter it out in the trash.

This is a real shame because those that are actively trying to find decent content or offer valuable services may feel that they too are being ignored by the very people they are trying to help.

Perhaps in the future, a few UI tweaks could help the user identify scam from legit offers by having a registry where services and offers can get an 'accredited service' label or something that identifies it as useful. If a service becomes spam or scam, it could be downvoted until it no longer holds the label or something similar.

This way, users would be able to skip all offers that are outside of the label instead of all offers in total. This may also help reduce scammers in the system and therefore those that get scammed.

It is ridiculous that this is even an issue but I think that whenever there is money involved, there will be people looking to take advantage of those within the system and one clear way is to mimic legit services.

I am not sure if there is ever a complete solution but the more we incentivize valuable content and services and disincentivize scam, spam and worthless, the better.

Anyway, for now, there is little to be done except for people to ignore or click through to research. Remain vigilant though, there are a lot of scammers out there.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]