Let's solve this once and for all.
- I've given you one suggestion to get rid of some of all the spam! - Make sure to read this.
More than one year ago, I published an article with the title: "What's up with all the STEEM/SBD transfers to Dan, Ned, Berniesanders and all the other whales?! - JUST STOP IT! It's embarrassing"
Earlier today, @charles1 wrote a great post that got a lot of traction.
- Make sure to read his article here:
How Spam is killing steemit and what to do about it.
A little more than one month ago, I also wrote this:
How To Handle The "Upvote" Beggars? - One Of My BIGGEST Problems On Steemit.
And that article got an upvote by @dan himself. The Co-Founder of Steemit.
As @dantheman didn't leave a comment in this article, I can't say exactly why he decided to give me an upvote, but I think it comes down to different things.
First of all, I suggest a feature in that article. A feature that will make articles invisible, if they receive "reports". - I believe this is one of the reasons for Dan's upvote. - Even if he don't use Steemit in the same way he did in the past, I believe he can see why it would be a good feature for Steemit.
Another reason might be, just because he liked my initiative. Perhaps he didn't agreed fully with the actual feature I suggested, but he might just have liked the thought of something to increase the experience on Steemit and reduction of spam.
Anyhow...
The post I wrote about the wallet-transfers one year ago, looked like this:
That article was about people begging for upvotes. - Using the wallet. @dantheman upvoted that one too, and made a comment:
That being said, shown and proved...
- Most of these transfers are utterly USELESS and nothing but a WASTE of time and money.
However, these transfers still occur regularly. Every single day. In fact, these transfers occur literally every single hour... And it will be even worse with more people signing up. - If we don't do something about it!
Who Do We Fight?!
We are fighting against Bob, Dick and Jane. Mary-Anne and Duke too. - We fight against REGULAR people with INAPPROPRIATE behaviour. - These people are just like you and me, but they have only one intention.
They spam for two different reasons which both results in the same thing. PROFIT.
The two different reasons are:
- They beg for upvotes.
- They advertise their website/service.
Both of these things results in money.
Do you need an example?
There you have it. One wallet-transfer to bernie asking for an upvote. The other transfer is to my own account. An "introduction" to a Resteem service.
(The transfer to bernie is one year old and taken from my previous article.)
In my previous post, about the upvote-beggars, I mention all the private messages you get on Steem.chat and in the different Steemit-discord-channels.
These are annoying and disturbing. I don't mind getting a message from someone who have genuine questions, concerns or just want to be friendly.. - But the motives are almost always to dig deep in our pockets and to get themselves a big, fat paycheck.
Hear me out.
Steemit is not Instagram or Facebook. - Steemit is something entirely different, ten times better and Steemit have tremendous potential.
You could easily follow 5000 people on Instagram and get 2000 followers in 2 days. You could easily buy followers on both Instagram and Facebook and you can obviously do these lousy, meaningless follow for follow to build you accounts... - But why on earth would you do that on Steemit?!
Quality is important on Steemit, not Quantity.
If I was looking for money and nothing besides that, I'd rather get 1 whale upvote on my articles than 50 upvotes from minnows. - In terms of money, you would've made the same decision.
Even though most people know this, literally everyone is being spammed with links to people's latest articles. - Imagine how many messages a heavily invested, active, whale will have on a daily basis...
That being said...
I am nothing near an expert. I can't code and I don't know how a blockchain really works. - But, I do have some ideas to reduce the amount of spam. - If it's possible.
What I suggested previously, is some sort of "report" function, so spammers will have their articles INVISIBLE if X-amount of people report them. - Just like a flag, without punishing them in the same way. - I don't want to hurt their reputation by flagging them, because that will not only hurt them, it will also hurt Steemit in the long run.
Newcomers who doesn't know better might do this and it's not fair to punish them in the beginning of their journey.
But if we could have their articles being invisible, due to their spamming behaviour, they will eventually stop spamming their links everywhere. To everyone. - Which would automatically benefit Steemit, as we will reduce spam and encourage people to contribute to a better place with good quality.
Most people are looking for shortcuts. They want to go from "rags to riches" overnight, and that's not possible. - There are no shortcuts. Most people will have to work hard and put in TONS of hours to reach their first couple of dollars. - Some people will be lucky and score a big one before they can spell "Yippie!", but most people will have to work for several weeks before they get something "decent" in terms of rewards.
- Most people have to build their followings and things like that...
And that's why these so-called spammers are trying to find loopholes. To find shortcuts. - Even if they get 10 upvotes from whales, they will continue with the same, lame approach... - Because it actually worked the first time.
Wallet-transfers promoting services.
Let's face it. It's a bad approach. It's not better than sending private messages on discord or in Steem.chat. - It's equally bad and you should NOT do it, and we should NOT encourage or support this type of behaviour.
Also, with all these vote-buying-bots nowadays, people are using these services to reward themselves for CRAP replies. They simply make 10 replies and pay randowhale, booster or any other vote-service to reward themselves for it. - To me, that's basically STEALING.
Sure, they are paying for the service and they are using the services just like you can, but they are doing it completely wrong and they are raping the reward pool by rewarding their own SHITPOSTS.
Some sort of protection for this should also exist. - Perhaps a BLOCK is not sufficient enough as people could easily create new accounts, if they aren't already using multiple accounts. - Perhaps both flags and blocks could be possible or perhaps even exclude people until they reach a certain reputation level?
- That would certainly bring more quality to Steemit.
I beg of you.
Do NOT upvote any of these people's articles. Don't fall for it. Don't do it. - If you upvote their articles you don't only give them money, you also reward them for their behaviour... Which basically means that you support their approach. - And we DON'T.
#waronspam is a thing initiated by @stellabelle .... yep all this begging bs has to stop. It is seriously like going to the mall, in your car, getting out, walking into Macy's up up a random shopper and asking "can i have $5?" Why? "I just want your money..."
Smh. Idiots. Steemit owes you nothing, you aren't employed by steemit, no one else on here owes you anything either. I'm a huge advocate for creating organic followings of people who are following you because they want to not because of some zombie-esque "upvote for upvote "," follow for follow" bs.
That's why i created what is just a Facebook group at the moment, Steemit Dreamit with the idea being if you can dream it you can steem it..... dreams being original so your content must be also! And promotion of quality content to aid serious Steemians in gaining organic followings. Its a work in progress :)
sounds good, gonna follow you
Sounds great actually. If I still had my Facebook account activated I would've joined.. But I can't stand Facebook so I won't activate my account again. - But you are totally right that the spam needs to be put to an end. Quickly!
I'm not a big book of face person either. My personal account is basically dead i just run an art group and steemit dreamit :)
upvoted and resteemed - spam and self-voting by whales will eventually ruin this platform as the 'rewards' dwindle to zero for regular folks who will look to other avenues as their creative outlet
You truly deserve a medal for all the resteems! - Thank you very much!
thanx!
It is really simple to get rid of spammers but we all need to pitch in just like with a Facebook group for example. You shun those that come in and just flat out spam, red flag them, fire warning shots and for damn sure don't upvote their comment or their plagiarized posts. We have the power to keep steemit clean and not reward these people.
I do agree with you, but not fully. - I believe we must teach newcomers how to approach and behave on Steemit, before we hurt their reputation. - However, what you've brought up here wouldn't counter all the wallet-transfers. - And even though some people might enjoy to get free money, if you can call 0.001 money, I definitely not appreciate those transfers.
That being said, we do have the power to prevent this behaviour, all it takes is for someone to start and others to follow. - That's why I brought this up. I've given you an idea and hopefully someone might actually be able to use it to implement something decent.
Whilst I agree completely, if anyone would like to send funds to my wallet in exchange for me doing nothing, that's fine by me!
Yeah, but that 0,001 SBD they send for spaming isnt making you rich at all... Its just annoying everytime i get a wallet notification and when i go to check i have this spamming garbage...
Look after your pennies and the pounds will look after themselves 😁
I agree with you. However, I am looking for a get rich scheme.
I'm not sure you are in the right place my friend.
Yeah, I made a huge mistake here. This proves that I should proof read before posting! I meant to say that I am NOT looking for a get rich scheme. Busy day and long week.
Oops! Cheers for clearing that up, makes more sense now!
think he was joking, did a quick check on him
Haha whoops! Us Brits got no sense of humour!
Really? I love it and you are very well known for it here in Holland. Maybe because you're too Brexitted already? lol
That was my sarcastic English humour coming out 😊 See, hehe, not funny!
Yes maybe I need to take a trip home!
Hey @hitmeasap. This was a good post. Upvoted!
On the other hand, your offer here can be used for promoting spam. I know you call it charity, but it is basically the same thing booster or randowhale are doing. Isn't it?
It would need to be a certain amount of flags though, because if it isn't, people with agendas and differences in opinions will abuse the flagging process, which will lead to false invisible posts.
Yeah, definitely! - You can't just implement a feature like this without proper research and thoughts beforehand. - A feature like this, is just what I personally believe would be a great implementation, and I truly believe it would help us keep Steemit the way it's supposed to be. I don't know exactly how it would function, but at least I've come up with an idea. Good or bad. :)
There are four reasons, actually. You left out to scam people" and "to get fast cash by outright plagiarism".
I honestly don't know what to do about the spammers. It would be nice if we had some actually active site admins that would help the community with these issues instead of just leaving it to the community to deplete their voting power over flagging these spammers.
There are people doing something about it. Check out the following posts:
https://steemit.com/spam/@personz/i-run-sadkitten-so-you-don-t-have-to-dealing-with-massive-amounts-of-spam
https://steemit.com/spaminator/@spaminator/10-102-spam-comments-need-flagged
This isn't the entire answer, but it helps.
Man this is getting really anoying, i got that reestem service message like 3 times already... The sad thing is that this spamming is done by a experienced user (not a newbie) who is clearly aware that this behaviour is wrong...
I would go a step forward and proposse reporting the user itself instead of only the post... Getting all his posts invisible would do the trick faster...
The common reply I get when I bring up this topic is as follows: "It's too hard to find all of the bots and stop them." And this mindset is what is going to kill Steemit.
The more that we let people continue to build bots and deplete the rewards pool with these schemes (which are predominantly run by whales by the way), the more that others are going to attempt to do the same thing. Because simply put, money talks.
At the end of the day, we live in a capitalist society (I can't tell you how many people have given this reason to me as the reason why bots are allowed and the pay for upvote schemes are legitimate) ...Ugh...
Steemit is about building a community. It's not about being a capitalist, or about bringing the faults of the "real world" into the blockchain.
We need to stop all of the dumb s%*t that's destroying Steemit before it gets out of hand (I don't think we're too late .. yet).
Hopefully enough people will realize that the number of new users is dropping, the number of active users is dropping, the amount of rewards that each post is receiving is dropping, the quality of content contributed within the community is dropping, .... and Steemit is dying. Hopefully enough people will realize this before it's too late and we're all able to still do something about it...
This would be a great solution. Too bad steemit doesn't seem to be adding anything new lately and are seriously lacking in developing this site further. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes but there seems to be a ton of great ideas for improvement coming from users and zero ideas being added (good or bad) from the development team of this site.
and you also have keyword targeted reply bots if you post for example in #food they will answer that looks delicious , please follow and upvote me ...
This is not only a good post, it also keeps the spammers away.
Haven't seen any spam-comment here.
Think I'm gonna "mix-in" the word SPAM in some kind of way in all my future posts, haha
It's truly remarkable actually. I usually get a few "follow me" replies in my articles, so this must have been some sort of defense for that BS. :D
I have the same worries about this can happen because all the spam...
Good post!! Upvoted
Agree!!!! At least entertain me or tell me how a post, article, piece of music, or artwork made you feel or opened your mind or hopefully not, disgusted you.
I've actually flagged a few people recently and I'm a bit of a newbie.
I keep saying, we're all in this together so go for quality! Is there hope? I think so or I wouldn't still be here!
Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
I wish Steemit would do something about it. Some of the comments I received already, and I only recently joined, were ridiculous. My last post was a lengthy article and it got a "great post" seconds after being published.
Hi @hitmeasap. I am a newbie and I used to post my short poems on steemit. I fish for replies not rewards. I was very discouraged with the amount of non human comments. So now I just comment and move on. Thank you for this post.
I don't care if 1000 or more accounts all sent me 0.001 SBD ....haha then I've almost got $1.00 It cost me nothing, and I have no obligation to do anything except keep their donation/bribe. But seriously it is bad all the wallet exchange 'donation/bribes' begging to be noticed. I think that imaptience to be rich is the driving force behind the practice.
You got an upvote & resteem from me.
Steem on beyond the moon, who's with us? Good luck to us all.
In your opinion begging for upvotes and trying to promote a private business define as spam . I accept that . I don't accept being told or having it implied that any individual can use the quality of a post to define spam and is entitled to flag on that basis .
I know @hitmeasap its getting out of hand truly, But i also think we are learning from each other. And eventually there would be a good ethics using steemit. your right now to ruin their reputation, hope some one can create a boy that gives a red card to spammers and maybe give a limit as a warning. Then if exceeded can be fouled out for a couple of days or so
I agree we should hang these beggars, and if you agree, please send me 5 SBD asap! :) Cheers.
"First of all, I suggest a feature in that article. A feature that will make articles invisible, if they receive "reports". "
These "reports" could also be used for censorship. This type of functionality will open the doors to all kinds of abuse.
Although I agree that all those spammers are making money from everyone. We, minnows, crave attention and growth. We feel like we are forgotten and neglected, especially by the whales and dolphins. As a new small fish, I thought this is the way to get known and paid whatever I made to a couple of those spammers and bots. of course, lost my money and got nothing in return. I wasn't told and the names that do the spamming are well followed, supported and appreciated it seemed.
It is true that steemit doesn't owe us anything and we shouldn't expect a get rich at all. But all the founders and supporters of Steemit since it was a baby owe their baby support and love. If you want to clean steemit from spammers, then deprive them of their target, the minnows and larger fishes.
There are multiple problems in the platform these days. I hope someone will hear what I say and do something about it. Or at least tell me that you hear and will try to do something about it. It is sad to be ignored because I am "no-one important" on steemit.
1-Many people are spamming the platform with crappy posts. Good posts from new people are hard to spot if you get thousands of posts every second.
2- Promoted tag: some posts stay on promoted forever, even after they are paid, while others disappear quickly. Why? I don't know. I tried it and my post didn't take 2 min there then disappeared.
3- Trending and hot tags: what makes a post trending or hot? How do we make posts good enough to get noticed on hot or trending? It is a mystery to me.
4- Maybe allowing point system to reward authors and curators will make new people less likely to want fast fame and prevent spammers business.
I am grateful to have found about steemit and I have a chance to share my art, photography and writings. It just sometimes becomes very discouraging when nothing we do seem appreciated or acknowledged day in and day out. All the while, many people are discussing these issues but nothing is done, except an increase in spammers/bot business.
Thank you very much for making this platform, for the post and for your attention.
Sincerely :)