As Steemit grows we are seeing more abuse of the system. It's inevitable that people will try to make more than they really deserve. Steemit is supposed to be about rewarding the best content, but we can see a lot of pointless content making more than some people do from their hard work. This can sometimes be one word comments that have nothing to do with the post or posts that plagiarise others.
CC image from Flickr
I don't know if this idea has already been implemented already, but I'll lay it out here anyway. There are a number of accounts such as @cheetah and @sherlockholmes that look for posts and accounts the violate the rules and/or spirit of Steemit. They publish lists of the offenders. Cheetah will leave comments to give some indication that a post is plagiarising so that people can choose whether to vote, but that may get buried by other comments. Some of these comments mention that people are on a blacklist that I assume is for the worst cases. Is this list public?
What I propose is some way to know if a post you are seeing is by a known offender. That could be via a browser extension that consults public blacklists. Those lists ought to be on the Steemit blockchain so that we can verify the source. Perhaps they could be on posts with a specific tag and conform to some format that can be automatically read. I'm thinking that the extension would allow you to choose which sources you trust to audit users. It may be that some will specialise in certain languages or other sorts of community.
Although I am a software developer this sort of thing is outside my area of expertise, but I'm sure there are others here who could do this. It will require some cooperation between developers and those who compile the lists.
Of course mistakes will be made and there should be ways to appeal against getting blacklisted. I've seen people do this on the abuse chat channel, but with some of them they must have known what they were doing was wrong. You should not expect to get paid for copying the work of others.
I don't know if they do it already, but the pay-for-vote services such as @booster, @randowhale, @minnowbooster should also be consulting blacklists so that they do not encourage bad behaviour. Is that likely?
I want Steemit to be a welcoming environment that really does reward good content and behaviour.
Steem on!
I'll buy guitar picks for Steem Dollars
If this post is over seven days old you can vote up one of my newer posts to reward me.
we need to get @cheetah and @sherlockholmes to make the list public in a post and then people can mute the offenders.
All Great ideas you raise here
I really like the idea of the browser extension to highlight those misusing the site, I hope someone sees this with the skills to be able to and the motivation to build such an extension
I agree that there should be counter measures. However, you would need very clearly lay out what are blacklist actions. The problem with blacklists are that more and more actions which were once "okay" later become blacklisted by whoever has the power to blacklist.
As a community, let's do it. But, let's also be clear!
I meant to mention that there ought to be some way to appeal. I'll add that to the post. I said we should be able to select who compiles the lists we use as they may use different rules
I love the idea. For now you can follow and mute the person. Haven't tried it so not sure how that feature works.
Surely we can find a way to penalize the abusers. But they will always find a new way. Make a new account or whatever.
Best thing we can do is stick together as a community and ignore these people. Not only through not upvoting and sharing their garbage content but also flag them and spread the word to fellow steemians when you see such posts so we can all flag them if we feel they are abusing the system.
So not sure we need new rules, we need to do better as a community in disrupting their income and they will stop or lose money.
Great post and thoughts. Im not a developer so cant help other than lending opinions.
I hope we can find a resolution to this problem as well. Thanks for posting!!
As individuals we don't have time to check the lists manually, but such a tool would indicate to you whether an account was dodgy. Then it's up to you how you act. I know some people don't like flagging, but it is a tool to cancel out rewards for bad behaviour.
Yep. 100% correct!!
when someone is in the blacklist he get a direct downvote and a comment to warn from chetaah
It's up to individuals how they want to react to such accounts. I know some don't like to flag, but they can mute.
I never heard of such a blacklist, from where did you hear ? As far as I see, its more like a platform, where people can also invest to have more power and make their posts popular. For example, one can create as many accounts as he wishes, by paying the account creation fee, and then use those accounts to make the post popular.
So now its more like a game of having more power based on investment.
I've seen Cheetah mention the list they keep. People are creating multiple accounts to vote up their own posts and this can be detected. If you know it's happening then you can choose to flag them. If Steemit is seen as a cesspit of abuse then people will be put off joining, but the community can deal with the issues and is already doing so.
No one can know, for sure. I have seen some account, but there is no system, which can prove that they are meant for making their own post popular. And whom do I prove is also another question.
All my frustrations came because of my experience in the chat, I have never asked anyone for a vote exchange or ask to upvote, and I was asking a general question in the chat. But a powerful guy (don't want take his name, as I don't want to be like him) told me there is no way you can success in Steemit now without investing. Though I am not discouraged but I felt bad.
Nobody knows it all. You can succeed anyway. It is just harder than when it started
@steevc I see you have your own site. I came across the below post which talks about a new coin, so wanted to share, if you want to use it. May be if you have may followers, it can be helpful to start playing with something.
https://steemit.com/news/@dragosroua/jsecoin-mining-crypto-currencies-in-or-with-your-browser
Hmm, not sure it's for me. I don't do much with my site
I know for sure i invented new technology device which finds out who has more than 1 account . So be careful don't make more than 1
meep
I will not, because its really painful to maintain more than 1 :). However, I am taking steemit to public to bring more people so that they can support me. I will invest and create account for them instantly, because so far that has been the biggest frustration to whomever I persuaded to join steemit.
I have created a tag even for that.
https://steemit.com/blog/@sanjeevm/planning-to-take-steemit-beyond-steemitlive-is-borne-this-day
Yeah without investment, it is a herculean task to succeed here now.
Community-run blacklists are an interesting idea. I'd only want it if we intentionally have multiple ones to keep any one list from becoming too powerful - elsewise whoever runs the blacklist may have the power to destroy a Steemian's reputation with a single click.
I think it would be great to select the set you want to use with an option to whitelist people
I really love this idea @steevc, I hope someone can make it a reality!
I have found some users coming to my post and making comments which are practically not relevant with the post itself and making more money than the post itself and not even upvoting the post! Crazy indeed!
Something need to be done quickly as this abuse is growing each and everyday!
Thanks for raising this important subject man!
@progressivechef
It will be like the adblocker extension by chrome so we do not see any annoying ads there. I really love your idea for the extension and soon we will be seeing it happen very soon.
Maybe we can implement something like karma into the Steemit.
The lower karma of user, more penalties he gets. It is a very popular solution in games. Did not think it through entirely, but I hope you get the direction I am aiming at.
Isn't that something like our reputation? That doesn't affect income, but it could be taken into consideration. A lot of spammers have a really low rep due to to flags
No, I would say reputation is like level - you grow with a time because you comment, post articles etc.
But karma is something like - the attitude of others towards you. If you have been rude to someone the whole day they can vote for to downgrade your karma and because of that some of your options will be locked. In steemit it could be less earning or for example inability to write comments or post articles.
Steemit reputation is based on how people vote for you. It can be destroyed by flagging. You don't gain any extra privileges for a higher rep, but maybe you should. If low rep accounts couldn't post as much it would reduce the spam.
Agreed, it was not the best example to compare reputation and level, since level usually can't be downgraded, but yea, either reputation should have more abilities or there should be implemented another quality for a user which would decrease spam.
i like idea to fight against spammer with all methods like blacklist, or block wallet spam and others, question is how to contact developers of steemit with my idea? i got some ideas but not sure where to write
Do a post about it. You can reach some developers in the chatrooms.
Poor content don't make money, why worry about it?
Unfortunately it does. It really is a problem and it harms steemit
I have noticed that most accounts are spam accounts or at least the most visible accounts are spam accounts i would imagine that a counter measure will pop up eventually your proposal of a browser extension sounds good
There are a lot of 'bot' accounts that just vote for those who control them. There are also a lot of good people here. We can encourage them and between us we can deal with the spam
As long as it is possible to make anonymous accounts it will be hard to blacklist anything but accounts - I think that it simply has to be a sisyphos-work done by the part of the community that find such things interesting. I made a lot of work for steemcleaners/steemabuse in the autumn and it was a constant discussion of resonability and fairness.
The Blacklist simply mean that users (and witnesses) Abit and Pfunk flags the reputation out of a profile.
and to be honest I see no better way than a vigilant and active community. Systemic counter measures can simply get to draconian and can be misused (and if there is something Steemit constantly has to battle with it is misuse).
The problem for most of us is that we may not spot a plagiarist or other abuser and upvote them. If something popped up in my browser to say they had been caught out then I could make my own checks and then take appropriate action of my choice. We need to do all we can to ensure crime doesn't pay and then at least some of them may give up
I think that communication and the ability to find things are one of the greatest challenges on this platform. On the platform it is only possible to write warning etc. in a post and that is not a good way to communicate. Cheetah is already in the commentfield and as there is no privacy on Steemit it is always possible to check all the actions the user has done and all the flags he/she has.
I am still rather dubious about a centralised warning - steemcleaners are not an official channel, just some users that has made their own vigilante organisation (consisting of fine people by the way).
Thank you for remembering that there is a blacklist on Steemit. I will finally be able to be quiet with all the spam.
I'm not sure it does exist in this form yet
Could you not blacklist repeat offenders IP addresses? As well as the accounts they would be using... This would deter the majority. i would believe it's newer members mainly due to them wanting to have more reputation, not understanding the ethics and morals of the community.
Realised i was replying to 1 persons comment 😂
Not sure if that would work with Steemit. They can operate on the blockchain directly to avoid web blocks. There are also other sites such as Busy they could use.
Ah, shows how new i am to all this! Was a nice idea though ;)
Or at a later date... when it seems a larger audience is using steemit, make a small charge to join... maybe a text message or you have to buy some currency.
Then whenever people get put on blacklists, it would be at there expense... that's if we could detect them accounts quick enough
Actually they do have to pay to join to jump the queue. That may be the only way eventually as Steemit will run out of funds eventually. My suggestion was based on my long experience here. Steemit is not like other social sites. It's more of a wild west
I agree there, but I'm confident the community will eventually have everything umder control. Genuine people will be the only true earners and anyone doing this "follow for follow" will just get phased out and become very unpopular as are ads on tv and who doesnt start flicking channels when you've seen an ad too many times, hopefully similar will happen with them
Yes it makes me unfair that there are those types of users, who take advantage of the application. Since one, being new, we put more desire to write good content for people to vote and get a little profit just like everyone else.
A few bad apples ruin it for everyone. I like the idea of a public list. Let these turds be known.
I'm new and have seen @cheetah and @sherlockholmes advising against certain users and their post. When we run across these what kind of action should we take?
As a new user you can't have much effect by flagging, but you will at least know not to vote those people up. You can mute them to avoid seeing anything they post or comment.
No I'm sure i don't haha i think one issue with steemit is, it's all quite confusing how it works at first and it seems the accounts that are the main culprits are either new or just constant spammers.
I cant deny, i did start to do that... only as i didnt exactly understand the idea behind steemit and how to become more popular... which i would hope most people realise they are just annoying putting silly comments like 'great post!' Or something similar.
It's social media and some people just don't get the social side of things...
I'd say i have a long way to go before truly understanding everything here
Flag them! They need to be removed... my first post has 2 people pointlessly commenting "follow for follow" i was baffled what they were trying to gain at first haha
Thanks for the vigilance Steve, peace