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.
