As of mid May something new occurred on Steemit, so called bot-trails. Everyone that creates a post instantly got approximately 10 new followers. So far I'm still clueless what the idea behind this phenomena is?
What I do know is that it's getting bigger and bigger. At least 156 accounts are used for the bot-trails. But most likely there are many more.....
Did it stop or just pause?
At the end of May it looked like it stopped. But for my last post I got 7 new followers. Let's have a slightly different approach and look at the bots themselves.
Bot sample to check their activity
On 30 May as well as on 4 June I checked for 3 bots how many accounts they are following:
Opex 28,410 / 38,808 = +10,398
Saliman 27,895 / 38,231 =+10,336
Danila89 28,086 / 38,361 =+10,275
These numbers clearly show that all 3 bots have been very active. Since these accounts are created 2-3 months ago you could even say the bots are more active as ever before. If they only start following active authors, the number of following should decrease in the coming weeks, since we have close to 50k unique authors on a monthly basis.
Overview of my most precious new followers 😜
5 June: 1
4 June: 7
31 May: 0
30 May: 0
26 May: 16
25 May: 17+7+9+7+17+12
24 May: 16
22 May: 18
16 May: 2
14 May: 10
13 May: 2
7 May: 2
5 May: 5
3 May: 3+3
26 April: 2
10 April: 1 @farad 120,790 followings!!!
That's a total of 157 new followers!
And although they're still not causing any huge issue I wonder how it's possible that someone (or are we looking at more individuals?) could create so many new accounts?
And besides those bots I saw many more bots among my new followers.
I noticed that too! I mean, I know I got great content (LOL) but I'm not that popular. Also your alldutchenglish tag caught my eye, I lived in NL for 4.5 months. LOVE your country!
Im getting less now - i think most of them follow me now!
The record i have seen is someone following 350k people!!!
That's really impossible 😩
Among those 350k accounts are many inactive ones. Most of these bots are pretty useless 😥
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Hi @crypto-econom1st
Im glad to see that you're still active on steemit :)
I've been away for a couple of days and just got back. Loads of catching up to do and obviously checking if you're still around has been on my priority list.
Also tx for interesting update about bots. Upvoted big time.
Yours,
Piotr
I was also wondering about this. Thanks for posting.
Your welcome!
Thanks for upvoting.
Btw I saw you are new. Did you know that it doesn't help to upvote a post that is over 1 week old? That's because the pay out was already done.
lol yes my account is two days old. I had no idea about the upvotes not helping after one week. Thanks for letting me know!
that explains it...