Flagging. Someone has to do it.
Flagging these accounts is where a good chunk of my voting strength has gone recently:
@katauta
@eadabrinn
@doryaeriell
@essalucina
@katinababbie
@sabalinet
@orhun
@brittancassandra
@juninalethia
@dawnasheelagh
@katinababbie
I'm sure there are many, many more. These are just the ones commenting on my posts or that I've seen clearly on other posts.
They are obviously spam bot accounts, and they all follow the same pattern:
- Comment
- Vote
- Follow
- Reblog
- Repeat
Some ways you can spot them:
- All of these accounts were created in September 2017.
- They all use female avatar pictures.
- None of them post their own root blogs. It's all just reblogs.
- They all start their meaningless comments with the author's username.
- They never reply.
- Their comments all use poorly generated text like this:
Excellent... Motivating and it will make me joyful to check out effort and resolve prevail. Adore it..
Really intriguing and insightful submit. Want you the most effective with all of your potential endeavors.
Thanks for publishing this Charming instant in time for yourself..
I love making sweet, sweet curation rewards with my Steem Power as much as the next Steemian, but if we don't show these spammers how pointless their efforts are by putting their accounts to 0 with our flags/downvotes, all they will do is fill up the blockchain with useless noise. As a Steemit witness, I wanted to raise some awareness about this and ask some of the larger accounts to save some of your voting strength to flag these down to a zero reputation.
Maybe if things become so obviously spam, Steemit, inc might consider undelgating their delegated steem power to these accounts. If they want to spam our blockchain, at least make them use their own money to do it.
Have you noticed any other accounts fitting this pattern? Go ahead and light them up in the comments. I'm not going to use up all my voting power on these, so eventually I'll just mute them, but I'd like to get their reputation down quite a bit before then so everyone else can simply ignore their spam.
Steemit is our home. Sometimes we have to do a little house cleaning.
Last weekend, my Twitter account was suspended because I called someone on there a dumb bitch. She really was being a dumb bitch though. I asked her a question, and rather than answer it, she tagged 5 other people to start a fight; While playing dumb about what I asked her.
What I didn't realize is she was the leader of a Twitter Troll Gang that goes around False Flagging accounts They don't like. So even though Ted Cruz can watch Full on Porn on Twitter; even though people call folks names on twitter all the time; Even though I was not actually in violation of twitter's community rules, My account was still suspended.
Why?
Because a person with enough influence and enough mindless followers, could point at someone and say "Flag this person" --- and whether that person is really in violation or not; the System is set to Suspend them anyways.
So while I get what you're saying here - I'm not a big fan of these kinds of efforts bro. They often harm people who aren't in violation of rules - as a similar thing happened to me on Facebook as well. Several outspoken people of color have noticed their social media accounts flagged, or taken down on these platforms - mostly over False Flagging.
MOST recently it happened to Desus and Mero -
Just like they say in this commentary; You have Nazi's on Twitter calling people all sorts of N-words - there is full on porn throughout the 'community' - and yet I get what you're saying.
You don't want all this useless value on the blockchain; and while your motivations are pure (unlike the twitter trolls that got me suspended) - this practice of pointing out who others should flag; needs to stop in my opinion. The people who create these sites need to do a better job of Monitoring their platforms; We, community members, need to be less willing to do their jobs, for them. Because unfortunately most of us are not trained in moderation; and mess this task up royally; or use biases to flag people who are not in violation; causing harm to people who don't Truly deserve it...
Glad you made almost $80 on this post though!!! Some good news at least :)
It sounds to me you took your personal story and applied it to this situation which is much different.
There are no humans involved in these comments.
As a programer, I recognize algorithmic commenting from bots, and I can recognize it possibly before many others can so this post is useful to them. This isn't about flagging another human, it's about flagging a non-human bot flooding our network with spam. I'd never condone any form of censorship against an actual human here unless they are causing harm to others. I've posted at length about flagging. I've been flagged consistently myself (read that post for details).
I'm sorry to hear your Twitter account was suspended, but maybe calling someone names isn't the best approach to conflict resolution? Lead with non-violent communication and you probably would have had a much better outcome (though it sounds like if you piss off the wrong people, you can still get censored, flagged, etc).
The reason this post did well financially has less to do with the post and more to do with the following of people who appreciate the content I've been publishing here for over a year and choose to reward that. Those votes (many of them automated) bring some of my posts to the hot and trending pages so others can find them and vote them up as well.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Though I don't agree with you in this case, I'll give you a vote for speaking your mind. The blockchain can't be censored, so everything we put on here stays on here, even if it's flagged.
We are working behind the scenes to develop some useful tools to help counteract the spam problem. Stay tuned; this isn't how it will have to be forever.
Thank you, Sneak! That's really great to hear. Sometimes I wonder how to get Steemit's attention on matters like this so it's very encouraging to see you all listening and participating in these conversations.
I'm confident what you're working on will be helpful. Depending on the timeline involved, would it be worth implementing an intermediary solution? Maybe a list of obvious spam accounts which the witnesses could agree upon so that Steemit, Inc could remove the new account SP delegation from them?
It's really important to me to keep Steemit uncensored so I know this isn't a simple problem to solve. Any tools we develop to prevent these spam accounts could sadly be used by bad actors who gain enough power to do so. I'm thinking about bad whales or governments down the road.
I'm excited to see what you all are working on.
We already have/do this.
I wish there was an easier way to track who is delegating to whom. Maybe a future wallet improvement could make that number linkable to a table showing where the delegated steem comes from.
As for that process, how do you determine who should be undelegated and is that something we in the community can help with? Transparency on how all that works would be really helpful to know about.
Thanks again for your time as I know it's valuable. Looking forward to meeting you at Steemfest!
Edit: So for example, the accounts I mentioned here in my post: What process is there for us to request steemit, inc to undelegate their steem power to them? Based on this comment it appears Steemit is given them that bandwidth via delegation which they are using for spam.
This is 2 very good news!
Mr. @sneak, I have a bone to pick with you...you recently downvoted one of our member's comments and I'm shocked, honestly. I'm assuming you may think it to be a spam bot and got confused. @sneaky-ninja is an account we have set up specifically for members of #thealliance to buy upvotes from via his delegation we set up. No different than @bellyrub or Rando or the goat or minnowbooster except it is done MANUALLY. All of our allies are good content creators as that is one of the stipulations because we won't vote on any rubbish. We are even writing a backstory for him and it's really quite good. In the future, please delve a little deeper into what you are actually downvoting.
@lukestokes, several of our members, including our witness, have taken to downvoting spammers. One thing I've seen recently, is they will leave a comment like 'nice post, upvoted'. Then, if you upvote or reply to that post, they will come back and edit the comment with several links and a beggars guise. I am assuming this is to prevent the initial downvote on the spam itself. Tricky, I wouldn't have noticed if the post wasn't hot. So, something else to watch out for :)
Post changing: Wow, that's shady. Yeah, with the 7 day payout it can be awkward if something you vote on gets turned into spam. Thankfully, everything is on the blockchain so it can clearly be shown what happened when.
As to your beef with sneak, maybe hit him up on chat first? Vote buying is generally something that is frowned upon here, but there are many forms of it, some better than others. If someone does a "vote up this post and I'll..." then that usually gets a downvote. I'm not familiar with what you're doing, but if the main developer from Steemit, inc doesn't like it, you may want to ask around in chat to figure out why.
I´m really curious, what´s it exactly that you´ll come up with. Those Spam Accounts are just so annoying as they tend to push good comments downwards and leave you with their nonsense in the top...
Thank you !!! We all need that. Who doesn't love sincere response or feedback instead the same kind of comment all the time
Thank you, @lukestokes, for your efforts to keep our steemit clean.
IMO, your actions and similar actions from other steemians have caused the spam to decrease clearly.
I strongly agree.
This comment has received a 22.50 % upvote from @lovejuice thanks to: @sadekj. They have officially sprayed their dank amps all over your post rewards. GOOD TIMES! Vote for Aggroed!
Hello Luke. We are glad to see you are doing this to ensure we have a healthy community and getting rid of these spammers.
We work towards the spanish speaking community by detecting plagiarism and abuse, we are the equivalent of cheetah in spanish.
Here is our introduction post in english in case you want to read about this project backed by the witness Cervantes.
Have a great day, best regards.
Very cool! Very glad to see this happening.
Ah! I think you flagged two of them on one of my posts. Thank you. I'm also using @commentwealth to flag spam. Feel free to ping me on discord and I'll send CW out to troll.
@commentwealth does seem to be a great tool, especially for micro-minnows. :D
Thanks @gregvence - yes, I especially thought it could help minnows because, when you're new, you don't want to rock the boat by flagging people.
That's a pretty cool project! Thanks for letting me know about it.
how does that work? Do I just follow them and it'll flag spam??
I completely agree brother.
It sucks to have to use voting power to stop scammers but its an investment in a better future. Once they get down they don't show up anymore and they loose. The only reason these scammers do it is because they profit. If they didn't profit they wouldn't do it. You can stop them, WE can stop them!
Then no one will do it anymore because its a waste of time. That solves it.
I have proposed that we have more guilds that reward people for reporting leach accounts and then having delegated power to stop it in its tracks asap. I see it happening soon.
Thanks for your contributions to the platform.
SteemON!
I also detected @redeyes, @eureka9 and @smartdeveloper with slightly different pattern: no names in comments, no any own posts, but only resteemed and all comments are about nothing
Yeah, looks like spam to me.
Thanks for your willingness to clean house and keep the community strong. Much appreciated!
I found these spamming me:
@oguz
@juninalethia
@oguzdelioglu
@emmalynnemiriam
@agnessejanot
@elladinenolana
I flagged them