In recent days, I’ve been reflecting on the persistent spam wave that has been plaguing the Hive Blockchain. This isn’t just a minor annoyance—it’s a growing issue that undermines the integrity and quality of our platform. Today, I want to share an idea I had to combat this challenge and invite your thoughts and suggestions on how we can refine and implement it effectively.
For some time now, we’ve observed a rise in newly created accounts that seem to have no other purpose than publishing SEO-focused spam. These accounts churn out content that is often AI-generated, devoid of meaningful value, and intended solely to manipulate search engines through backlink generation. This type of spam can be broadly categorized into two formats:
- Long-form articles promoting products or services: These are designed to climb search engine rankings, often filled with keywords and links aimed at boosting visibility.
- Blatant scams: These posts are crafted to deceive and mislead, luring unsuspecting users into fraudulent schemes.
Take this example of a scam post that we’ve come across:
This kind of content has no place on our platform. Hive is a space for genuine creativity, knowledge sharing, and community engagement...not a vehicle for dishonest SEO strategies or scams.
The Problem at Hand
The primary goal of these spammers is simple: to get their content indexed by search engines. By doing so, they aim to achieve visibility, drive traffic to their target sites, and further their malicious agendas. Unfortunately, our platform’s frontends inadvertently facilitate this by making such content accessible to search engine crawlers.
My Proposal to Combat Spam
Here’s where I believe we can step in and make a difference. My idea is to leverage existing SEO mechanisms to curb the impact of spam. Specifically, we could implement a system where flagged accounts and their content are rendered invisible to search engines. This could be achieved by:
- Automatically applying a “no-index” directive to content from accounts flagged as spammers. This includes:
- Accounts on blacklist databases.
- Accounts with a reputation score below a certain threshold (e.g., 25).
- Accounts that have been manually reported for posting spam.
When the following meta tags are applied to a page, search engines like Google, Bing, and others are instructed not to index the content:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
For Google specifically, an additional tag can be used:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
By doing this, we can ensure that spam content doesn’t appear in search engine results. This hits the spammers where it hurts most—their visibility. Without the ability to rank in search engines, their incentive to use Hive as a platform diminishes significantly.
Why This Approach Makes Sense
Unlike manual moderation or outright deletion, this method allows us to systematically neutralize the effectiveness of spam content without removing it from Hive entirely. It’s a proactive way to preserve the open nature of the blockchain while protecting the platform from being exploited.
Moreover, this solution leverages tools that search engines already provide, making it technically straightforward to implement across our frontends.
A Call for Collaboration
While this idea feels promising, I understand it’s not a silver bullet. There are likely technical nuances and potential challenges to consider.
For instance:
- How do we ensure legitimate users aren’t unfairly impacted?
- What’s the best way to integrate this feature into existing frontends without causing disruption?
I’m sharing this proposal as a starting point, and I’d love to hear your perspectives. Do you see merit in this approach? Are there additional strategies or technical solutions we should explore?
Let’s collaborate to protect the integrity of our platform and ensure Hive remains a place for genuine, high-quality content.
thanks.
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Hi Louis. This sounds like a good idea to me. Just need front end Devs to co-ordinate, code & implement, if agreement can be reached by witnesses. Maybe best way would be to make a proposal?
There are ways to deal with spammers, scammers, sock-puppets & bots at an earlier stage, as part of an on boarding process. i think it would not be easy to get witness consensus to change the code so it could be implemented though.
i've been discussing a design of a system which could effectively solve the spam, scams, socks & bots (SSSB) issues. It would be a FOSS (free & open source) system that could potentially be used by any organisation of large groups of people.
If you're interested in learning more & even contributing to a discussion and the design, you can read more in this Snap: https://peakd.com/@atma.love/re-peaksnaps-snvac7 (and all the comment threads below it, and in this post: https://peakd.com/hive-117711/@atma.love/anonymous-accounts-bots-and-socks
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That's a great idea. We would have to persuade all front-ends that allow publishing posts/comments, right? Including those like Actifit, as you can engage with content through its website.
Accounts with rep < 25 sounds like an idea. Or rep < 0. Or something in between.
Not sure if I want blacklists or manually reported accounts. Who is reporting to who could turn into an issue.
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I like the ideas around using built in reputation system to label spammer & scammers.
I've not seen too much of such spam, but I have found a fair few accounts that seem to be in the UK and only seem to do a post or two talking about their business. I wonder if someone is providing that as a service to boost their SEO.
So far the spam here has not been as bad as you might expect. That may be down to the cost of creating accounts.
There may be some value in preventing spam from being indexed, but others will know more about that than me. We already have people saying they are censored by downvotes, but their content will remain. Someone could provide a front end that showed everything. These are some of the challenges we will face as Hive grows.
trust the race between hackers and identity verification processes is won by the later
That's a great idea I reckon. Something potentially long overdue
Some good points in here - however i do not see a major problem here if people talk / promote their business in long form content (unless it is not full of referral links of course)
I haven't seen many spam/scam accounts. I think its a good idea but I'm worried about accounts being unjustly labelled spam. I see a lot of accounts unjustly downvoted for multiple reasons. There is no clear rules for people to abide by. I see too many accounts quit over verification. One account tried to verify but couldn't because they didn't have a well established social media account.
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In addition, I think increasing Resource Credit costs can help alleviate spam.
maybe we need to have an x10 of costs for posting to the chain ^^
Yes, I think that can have a very beneficial effect on the chain as a whole. We absolutely can handle RC delegations so that no genuine user has to worry about RC.
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I heard you developed a tool to check on the spam bot network and see which accounts have active payouts. Is it public/do you have a link for it?
Currently it's not public and only running by me.
Ok.