While using the @buildawhale service (I'll probably be posting about my experience after a little more use of @buildawhale) I've also learned about @badcontent. It's a bot that posts this reply to users that have been identified as steemians acting badly.
Photo Source: Steemit
The one thing you don't want to do is turn going down the @badcontent replies page into a drinking game. If you take a drink every time the words "where's your proof?" are posted by someone you will quickly die of alcohol poisoning and your body will become as well preserved as a dissection frog in a middle school biology class.
classic definition of a spambotmore modern "forum spambot"Many of the users who have been identified as having engaged in bad behavior insist that they have done nothing wrong and that they are being attacked by a "spambot". Is @badcontent a spambot? Technically no. The is a program meant to gather e-mail addresses in order to send out unsolicited e-mails (a.k.a. "spam"). As far as I can tell @badcontent isn't doing that. There is a but that definition doesn't seem to fit either with what @badcontent does.
Photo Source: Steemit
Spam is not spam just because the receiving person doesn't want to get what is being sent. A certain element of intent must be involved in order for something to be classified as spam. If @badcontent was targeting desirable steemians who post original content and kept replying over and over again, "Hey! Use @buildawhale!" that would fall under the definition of spam. @badcontent seems to do the opposite and targets steemians that @buildawhale doesn't want business with. In my opinion the intent of @badcontent is to socially shame bad steemians and act as a deterrent to anybody who wants to start using steemit and not get those replies. It also quasi-promotes @buildawhale but their service is steemit promotion so why shouldn't it? In my opinion the service to the steemit community @badcontent performs outweighs a little shameless promotion. How effective would Batman be if Batman had some rule that he could only fight crime as long as nobody could attribute Batman to his crimefighting activities?
But what about the users who insist that they get those replies for no reason? Well, let's find an example and see if by gathering facts a hypothesis can be formed as to why someone who insists he or she is wrongfully on the @buildawhale blacklist would be on it. From that hypothesis we can judge whether or not being on this list is warranted if the hypothesis is true.
Searching the term "@badcontent" in the search bar on the top right corner of steemit some results come up. The first blog against @badcontent is by @killerteesuk who is blacklisted. @killerteesuk will be the case study then as nominated by a search result and not chosen by any human bias.
Photo Source: Steemit
Going to the profile of @killerteesuk it states @killerteesuk joined in February 2018 and currently has 3315 posts. It's a little past the middle of June 2018 at the time of this writing so it seems like spam might be an issue. In order to judge that I need to find the average number of posts per day. That means finding the day @killerteesuk joined but the profile only says February 2018. In order to find the first post as far as I know that means scrolling through all 3315 posts to find what day in February the first post was made.
dManiaScrolling through the posts by @killerteesuk I began to see a pattern. The majority of posts by @killerteesuk were made via . In other words pretty much all @killerteesuk has probably been posting since February has been memes. It looks like perceived lack of quality may have also played a role in blacklisting @killerteesuk.
I never finished scrolling through all of the 3315 posts made by @killerteesuk. This isn't a research paper that is going to be published in a professional journal with APA formatting. I am just going to ballpark a range for the average number of posts per day 3315 posts makes. I am posting this before midnight PST on June 19, 2018. February 01, 2018 was 139 days ago. 2018 isn't a leap year so February 28, 2018 was 112 days ago. Rounding to three significant digits that shows @killerteesuk has a mean average of anywhere between 23.8-29.6 posts per day. Let's just say for simplicity that @killerteesuk has been posting on average one post per hour every day since February. That's quite a bit in my opinion.
While scrolling it appears @killerteesuk was blacklisted by @buildawhale around 22 days ago from the time of this writing. That means from the date @killerteesuk joined steemit in February all the way through March, April and almost all of May @killerteesuk was posting around an average of once an hour day and night and not on the @buildawhale blacklist for spam.
This post is not to argue whether or not someone like @killerteesuk is blacklisted because they are a fountain of ideas or they're doing it for a quick steem buck. The point of this exercise was to use an example of a user who insists that the user was unfairly blacklisted and try to come up with a hypothesis for a possible reason. I don't know whether or not my hypothesis is right about spam being the reason @killerteesuk was blacklisted. That's only the conclusion I am drawing from all available circumstantial evidence.
One final note: If anybody joins steemit and makes many posts every day hoping to get rich quick in my opinion that is also fraud. It is my understanding based on this linked post that the 15 STEEM power delegated to each account created by steemit is a loan. If you sign up to steemit only to get rich quick or under some false pretense you are theoretically taking that delegated 15 SP away from someone who honestly wants to share ideas and use that delegated 15 SP in meaningful ways.
If you want to believe that this post is biased because I have used @buildawhale to promote my posts several times then you are free to do so. Please don't complain to me about any blacklistings. As a customer of @buildawhale I have as much influence over them as I do over my local McDonald's. No, you are not sorry you no longer offer the McRib. People who are sorry don't smile like that while saying sorry. Sorry people don't call security after they realize that I am not leaving without a McRib. Sorry people don't tell security I fled into McPlayland which forced me to improvise the use of innocent kids as speed bumps trying to evade capture. Sorry people don't...
Sorry. I got off-topic for a moment. I'll save McDonald's for a future post. I'll probably promote it using @buildawhale.
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As the owner of both bots, I enjoyed reading this. Far more educated and reasonable than most of the responses.
I try my best to be fair and accurate when I am not using humor to make a point. I saw a lot of the word "spambot" being thrown around and not used the proper way I understand it to be used. It just seems weird that people are claiming to have been labeled falsely and then turning around only to misuse the term "spambot" in a counter-accusation.
The 2 bots that you own are pushing people away from Steem. Like holovision said " It just seems weird that people are claiming to have been labeled falsely and then turning around only to misuse the term "spambot" in a counter-accusation." The reason why is they don't understand that's its a bot. They think its a human person that harasses them and causes them to leave steem. One of the females in "Photography section" were targeted by the bot are slightly scared and cause them not to post freely. You're hindering growth community wise. I don't know if you review all the posts that bots flag at all or don't know how to program it. Spend an extra 200k on hiring a proper developing team to create a spam bot.
Obviously anybody who labels @badcontent a "spambot" knows it is a bot. They just place the bot in the wrong category. I can see a problem though with the @badcontent bot making a reply on posts whose author clearly is using english as a second language. An english speaker can understand the nuance and infer that it is someone's bot. I think users not as skilled with english tend to read it literally as something official from steemit and when they realize it's not official their misunderstanding tends to make them feel deceived and tricked.
Add in the fact spammers don't like being called spammers.
Those people are pretty weird sometimes. A few times when I see @cheetah identify a steemit post as similar to an internet article I go look at the internet article and the only real difference between the two is the title. Are there people on steemit who really believe changing the title somehow changes the whole article? That must be it because that's the only way I can rationalize why that happens.
When you add a financial reward to every action on a platform, people will do anything to get some of it, and even more to protect it.
Why is it considered acceptable to post 1-2 a day?
Excellent look and review of the badcontent bot. As expected though people are going to get mad if they are caught by the bot because they will always in their heads feel they are in the right.
Your post had been curated by the @buildawhale team and mentioned here:
https://steemit.com/curation/@buildawhale/buildawhale-curation-digest-06-25-18
Keep up the good work and original content, everyone appreciates it!
Wow! That is incredible! Thank you for selecting posts on steemit and converting them to audio so they are available to more users. I am definitely following you!