I run @sadkitten so you don't have to - dealing with massive amounts of spam

personz (66)in #spam • 7 years ago

Spam makes @sadkitten sad ... 😿

Recently I noticed the new @spaminator account publishing posts claiming that thousands of accounts are engaging in bot net spam scams. Not only claiming it, but they also had the usernames of all these accounts! It seemed pretty crazy there could be this many.

I thought it might be cool to train an AI to discover these accounts. Before I could get into that @transisto got me in touch with @patrice, the person who runs @spaminator, and after a conversation also including @pfunk I decided I would create a bot to counter the rewards on these comment farming schemes for the accounts already identified.

So that's what we put @sadkitten to work doing.

What is the scheme?

Some of the accounts make comments on their own posts or other random posts with a predefined dictionary of comments. One class of these accounts uses generic "nice post" type comments (example) and some others use random nouns (example). These are up voted by a large number of the other accounts (example) which invariably have a very small amount of SP. I'm not sure if this is just the amount delegated by Steemit on account creation or if they also include further delegation.

So this is flagrant spam with the purpose of extracting rewards from the reward pool. Per comment the amount is small but by doing it a lot it really adds up.

We know of around 5,500 accounts doing this at the moment.

What to we do to counter it?

Firstly I looked through a lot of the accounts to double check. There are a lot of them so I didn't check every single one, but I did look at a random sampling of several hundreds. @patrice had checked them first so this was just really to convince myself. I was convinced.

I created a bot which tries to counter the rewards on these posts, most of which are comments. @sadkitten has almost 150,000 SP delegated from @transisto so this was quite a lot to counter these small rewards. You can see for yourself on steemd for steemdb, but the flags were almost always less than 1%.

I'm proud to say that so far the bot has scanned through many days of these spam posts and used up from 100% down to 28.52% voting power! That's a huge amount and gives you an indication of how numerous the posts are. Over 7,500 flags were made in the last 24 hours.

What now?

We also added some accounts from @sherlockholmes, which both myself and @patrice checked and their list was legit. So we will continue to add spam accounts and run the bot to counter these. There may also be another whale joining into trail the flags and add their own to reduce rep further.

The spammers need to know that they cannot get away with this any more and we will not sit by and let our network be taken advantage of.

We do our best to make sure that no genuine accounts are in this list, even accounts in which the user uses pretty spammy behavior. @sadkitten is reserved at the moment for bot net scale spam. If you find that your account has been flagged in error, please get in touch in the comments or find me on steemit.chat

If you want to help find these accounts people get in touch with @spaminator or @sherlockholmes, not directly to me.

I will prepare some statistics of what the bot is doing when enough time has passed.

Anything else?

The time and expense I put into this I consider part of my witness activities, to help to protect the network by showing spammers they will not find these schemes profitable, and restore the reward pool for genuine content rewards. If you agree this is important please consider vote me as witnesses if you haven't already.

Vote for @personzzz (yes, three z's) for witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Thanks to @transisto @patrice @pfunk and @sherlockholmes

#steemdev #steemit-abuse #spaminator

7 years ago in #spam by personz (66)

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remlaps (65) 7 years ago

This is an approach I can get behind, focusing on spam instead of self votes. I'm still not a fan of flagging, but I think it's the lesser of two evils for now. I just delegated 100 SP to @sadkitten.

$7.28

8 votes

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transisto (74) 7 years ago (edited)

Thanks a lot for your vote of confidence. I think it should become a common good practice for every steemian to delegate a small % of their SP toward abuse countering efforts. Like paying a taxe to reduce crime rate.

$0.71

6 votes

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stellabelle (76) 7 years ago

yeah, this is definitely worth it. Thank you so much for donating SP for this cause.

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mindhunter (72) 7 years ago

I agree @transisto, but why are you using your sock puppet account @newsflash to downvote my posts CONSTANTLY on a daily basis?? What is the purpose of this?? It's flawed logic!

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personz (66) 7 years ago

Thanks @remlaps. I will get back to your comment on self votes I promise 😉 I'm still doing that too, and I see this in the same general area of activism on Steemit. But you don't have to agree with everything 😜

Thanks so much for the delegation, as @transisto said this means a lot.

$0.09

2 votes

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remlaps (65) 7 years ago

Another possible avenue to explore, if you haven't already looked into it: I notice that a number of these accounts (i) are new; (ii) have their recovery account set to @steem; and (iii) are basically unfunded except for some delegated SP.

I haven't tracked back the source of the delegations, but I assume they're conducting their abuse with SP that's delegated by Steemit, Inc. at account creation time. Is there a process to report abusive accounts so that Steemit, Inc. can revoke the initial steempower delegation? If not, can one be established?

$0.56

4 votes

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transisto (74) 7 years ago (edited)

We've already reported many account to Steemit Inc. and they did take off their delegation in a timely manner.

$0.52

5 votes

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reddragonfly (65) 7 years ago

@personz, this makes me super happy to see-- THANK YOU for undertaking this initiative! Also thanks to @transisto for delegating voting power to @sadkitten.

I know from past experience that this kind of activity can destroy a content site in short order if left unattended... not only does it drain the site financially like a small but constantly bleeding wound, but a lot of visible spam also slowly drives away legitimate users who don't want their content associated with garbage... so you end up with a "double bleedout." Whereas there is no central structure to "go bankrupt" here... developing a bad reputation as a spam repository could easily land us all with 5c Steem eventually... and I don't think any of us REALLY want to see Steem related to the ranks of "yet another shitcoin."

Anyway, you have my (very small) witness vote.

We should really have some kind of "multi level alert system." For example, this morning I came across someone who was (as an individual) spamming the same comment on dozens of posts... clearly not READING anything, but just using and refreshing the "NEW" feed every minute. Clearly, an individual-level problem, not a network-scale problem. As a small account, I can burn a little voting power on simply flagging the comment on MY post... but what about the 50 identical comments? I have 250SP... "that don't go far."