I am sure that all of you have noticed spam on the steemit. Yes, this is a huge problem of all social platforms. Here on steemit is even bigger because spammers are taking rewards by producing spam. Many people are aware of this problem. They don't know if Steemit is strong enough to solve this issue. I would like to show you an example of life-cycle of spam as a proof that we have nothing to worry about. The source of my analysis is one of the biggest spammer here on steemit. I am not going to tell you his name in this analysis. It's not necessary. He is dead already even if he don't know about it yet.

Content as a product

Content is a product. Every single product needs innovation. The content creators need to attract their followers by interesting ideas every single day. This is the same for all products. Look at the Apple. Would you spend hundreds of dollars to buy new iPhone? Probably yes. Are you willing to spend hundreds of dollars to buy iPhone 4. I bet you not. Innovation is the big issue for spam producers. I am here to show you consequences of inability to innovate in my quantitative analysis.

History

I took the data from spammers account history. The type of data as number of posts, income, up-votes , comments, down-votes. I put this data to tables for better calculation and visualization. Then I combined them to make an indicators of his life-cycle. Those indicators can predict his future. Let's look at the data first.

Great results

As you may see this guy made 53042 USD mostly by producing spam. I have to say for his defense he was not spammer till he realized this is good way how to make money. The spammer was able to collect 16418 up-votes and 1447 comments. He was lucky on the beginning because some of the whales were able to set up voting bots to his account. Let's look at the data below.

Behavior of participants

This is very nice example of participants behavior. As you may see on the charts below the number of up-votes is increasing almost every week. People were attracted by the new content In the beginning but after few posts they realized that content is useless.

People are willing to waste less and less time by posting comments now. In the other hand people are still willing to up-vote unreasonable content even if they know is useless. They keep up-voting posts only because the whales are involved.

The best representation of this behavior is Comments / Up-votes indicator. People are less interested of discussion.

The breaking point of this circle is when some of the whale find better content to follow. The smartest whale is no longer in the game.The other whales didn't realized that yet, but performance of the spammer is decreasing. It is only question of time when other players leave this spammer also, because there is still lower chance to make money out of his content. You can see this behavior also in performance chart. There is no longer positive correlation between Comments and Up-votes.

Money

The best indicator of this is performance chart of earned money. This is the rock solid evidence that some of the smartest whales are no longer interested to participate as a curator. Only minnows are still more and more interested. The numbers of Up-votes is increasing and amount of rewards is decreasing in time.

The best indicator of losing attention of big whales is this chart. This is a final proof of ending life-cycle. Author has no chance to survive without significant improvement of his content. He has an advantage in form of huge followers base but more important is that all people knows he is a spammer.

Conclusion

I wrote this post because I wanted to show you there is nothing to worry about in case of spam. Spam has very short life-cycle. Yes, you can be a bit frustrated if you see how those spammers make money over the real content creators. The fact is that bloggers are innovative and creative people. So keep it up at creation of good content and don't worry about spam.

Lifecycle of spam on Steemit - Quantitative analysis