A post of very little value.
No really, this is a post on nothing of use, not anything in particular and certainly nothing worth upvoting.
But it may well serve to be very useful tool in demonstrating some of the techniques used by many Steemian's, whales and minnows alike to grab a few (or a lot) of votes for rather marginal or useless articles.
If you have ever wondered why some articles you read and some authors you run across have SO many upvotes and so many followers, well stay tuned --- I'll be exposing some of these techniques is the days ahead.
If you really loved this post --- Then of course upvote it to show your love and support!
Invest wisely (in yourself) for the future.
Craig
See if you can spot the circle of "quality"
@devfund
and
https://steemit.com/steem/@fredrikaa/steempress-now-available-in-the-wordpress-org-plugin-store-introducing-v1-0
The above links are not meant to be judgemental, that is not my place to judge for you, but only to educate all that follow me or stumble on this post. Steempress is a great concept.
The example was simply chosen by picking one of the most active accounts on the bid-bots yesterday. It is up to the community to decide on what level of vote manipulations they are comfortable with and by whom.
This post could have just as easily been jacked up to well over 500 SBD or more -- money that would have been pulled directly from the rewards pool.
I halted all voting "help" several hours ago, so any further upvotes are without aid from me or any other accounts I may have access to.
Of note: I plan to create a series of posts that show everyone how to achieve these results and more if you so desire.
Do a search if you want to get started now, there are multiple articles on the subject.
If it is good for the platform, then EVERYONE should be doing it. If it not good, then no one should be doing it. If everyone does it and it is not good, then it will be corrected at the top level.
Profits from this post will be donated back -- got any ideas?
If you re only interested in showing the abuse I would be happy to take the profit from this 'worthless' post, lol.
I plan to donate the profits -- Not sure exactly where it will go yet, but I'm sure everyone will have some ideas.
You could spread them evenly among new users when they do their "introduceyourself" post.
Yes, this is certainly a good idea.
I also plan to produce a query showing those authors that use the introduce themselves tag more than twice.
If you are still looking for somewhere to place the funds, @steemflagrewards is a new spam fighting iniative in it's early stages and funds would be beneficial in implementing our flag comment mentions reward system.
We plan on creating a sophisticated bot that will facilitate a good flag incentive system. Essentially, crowdfunding of the fight against blockchain abuse. We are supplemental towards existing initiatives of the sort.
Votes, resteems, feedback and damn near anything would be very helpful. We just successfully worked alongside @spaminator to return about $31 SBD to the reward pool on a comment spammer and have raised about 20% of the way there for this campaign.
You definitely piqued my interest with this point. I am aware of a lot of manipulation and it is real frustrating.
I posted an article on tag spam.
Let me know what you think if you get a chance.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@bycoleman/naughty-tagger-s-list-tag-spammers-identified-now-the-balls-in-your-court
This might be the most elaborate game I've played yet XD
@anthonyadavisii I made two donations to your bots and rewards. There was not any profits from the post since I used the 100% SP, but I wanted to help our with your projects just the same. Check out the writing contest in my blog for a full breakdown of the cost/reward if your interested.
I have been doing more queries and came across this. What can be done here?
https://steemit.com/@madarafreeman
Thank you so much. Yes, we will certainly put it to good use.
I downvoted and commented @madarafreeman's latest. Hopefully they will understand what they are doing doesn't help minnows at all because it pulls upvotes away from good posts created by them. I will check out your contest.
You're welcome! I think I'm going to power up more so I can have a little bit more impact on such scams.
Many blessings!
i am not a scam you can chek my wallet in 6 days
using voting bots like the one you use (Minnow Booster) make steem fever the already rich users while new users get ignored
using this method i am helping new users get some spd to use voting bots
please help us the new users by upvoting and dont downvote us again
You are running a vote for vote and vote and up vote splitting scams. You are not helping minnows.
If you stop posting articles agreeing to split the proceeds with up voters, I will quickly remove the flags.
Great, Thanks for this. This may a worthy cause indeed.
Yes, it is very frustrating for the little guy to work so hard and not get noticed at all. Some very good articles and information just scroll down to never-never land while real trash rapes the rewards pool.
There is not a whole lot of profit on this post. A chunk of the rewards shown is SBD I pumped into it, but I'll calculate it our when it closes.
I'm considering a new contest with the profits to give to new minnows that produce great articles. Not sure If I can dedicate the time to the curation though.
I went to the @spaminator blog. Looks to be useful. I followed some of the downvoted authors and it looks like you are hitting the ones that need it.
But how much frequency is too much? Today I posted welcome messages to 50 or more new people in introduceYourself. Is that spam?
Frequency is pretty high. You'd need to spend 8 hours a day creating a post every 5 minutes or run a comment bot with more than a few hundred comments a day. 90% of those being flagged are users that have multiple account operations.
I had a look at your welcome comments and because some are similar:
link
link
Someone from the community may see it as spam and report you. @spaminator doesn't flag 'human' commenters normally. We do comment and warn them that they could be flagged by other members of the community.
The few exceptions for flagging human commenters is when they are committing some other type of abuse such as taking another users comments and using them as their own or rewriting them.
OK, Thanks this is very useful. I'm certainly not going to have that level of post. I do like to welcome people on-board though and I find it is a great way to get a conversation started and a new follower.
I just started this today. -- Let me know what you think.
I use a semi-automatic process. I run a query to identify authors with similar interests. Then I review each post briefly and if looks decent, I hit the post button and send the welcome message, but they are just welcomes and nothing more really. No buy this or do this for me and I'll do that for you trash.
If the person responds back, then I engage in a human to human conversation. I believe it is very beneficial to both of us.
So far, not a single person has ever had anything bad to say about the welcome to Steemit message.
What do you think about this type of welcome? Honesty is appreciated.
Personally I think your approach is great. There's too many 100% automated bots out that comment and their owners never even bother to engage the user.
I totally understand the semi-automation. @spaminator & @steemcleaners do much of the same thing with comment templates, reports from the community, and database queries.
I posted an article on tag spam. Let me know what you think about this please.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@bycoleman/naughty-tagger-s-list-tag-spammers-identified-now-the-balls-in-your-court
OK, Thanks. This helps me greatly to know I'm not unintentionally doing any kind of blockchain abuse.
Yes, It would be very easy to put it on full automatic and post every 20.5 seconds. (From multiple accounts for that matter) -- But I believe that is clearly an horrendous use of the platform and would provide very little in the way of useful results, as most of the messages would go to people that hold little in common with the bot's owner.
I followed you. I'll try to support you in these efforts. I'm going to be running a few discovery queries and posting the results each week including tag abuse.
Many blessings.
Tags revised at the 3 hour mark.
Thanks for sticking with me on this.
Craig
Blog is now listed in "Hot" after 3 hours. It must be a pretty darn good post after all.
https://steemit.com/hot/steemit
Craig
I think I see what you're doing here, and I'm going to love watching how this plays out.
Frankly, when I saw the title, the thumbnail image and the payout, I was pretty sure I already knew what it was, and after reading the comments I can't decide whether to fall out of my chair laughing or sigh at the time I've wasted writing my posts.
And you're right. This post, which is quite open about being absolutely nothing at all, has garnered more votes than my entire blog, and its payout is about 20 times the value of my entire account, which is something I've got to chuckle about, even with a bit of an envious sigh.
Well-played, good sir.
Yes, you have spoken much truth in your reply.
I'm really hoping that the witnesses will take not and put a stop to these abuses.
I'm employing simple tools. If you use the API it can get even more lucrative.
Have you noticed there are more votes than views!
Full disclosure will be soon enough -- but for all those looking to start digging, check out http://minnowbooster.net
There are many others.
@bycoleman I am very curious to learn more and see some of the inner workings of this platform that I am obviously not aware of. I am a very new user to the platform and I absolutely love the whole concept. I get the growth part and earning your reputation and votes. In my first week I have posted about 10 blogs and over 125 total posting in an effort to get my name out there and meet the community. I have quickly realized that it is incredibly difficult to even have your post get a sniff. It is quickly pushed to the bottom of the new pile and the people checking out the hot and trending will never scroll to where my posts live. lol I have noticed on several occasions the posts that have more votes than actual views. This had been a head scratcher for me since the start and I look forward to learning more as you continue your expose. I get that there are bots and I'm still not sure the value of them or the resteemers out there but what you're talking about feels so much bigger than that. Good luck and thanks for the information.
Thank you for the great comments.
Yes it can be VERY difficult to get noticed and unfortunately the odds are really against you when you first start out. Quality articles will eventually get notice, but you can help that process out a lot.
Please see the next article in this series.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@bycoleman/a-post-of-much-greater-value-how-to-increase-your-vote-count-dramatically-just-like-the-big-fish-do
Many blessings.
Okay, Now THIS link is the one I need to read.
I've been posting and posting and posting and researching and researching, and yet my most lucrative post has netted me a buck. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I think I ought to be making at least a little more than that. It's nice to see how to do that.
Yes, your articles are top notch. Once you get a larger following you'll be paid handsomely, increasing your vote count now increases awareness with a nice ROI.
Thanks!! Already read the article and am a follower now. Looking forward to the rest
Thanks -- I'll try to keep them rolling and educational.
Don't abuse the introductory post tag
Hi, this is actually a post to expose the use of this misuse of tags.
I'll be doing a write up on this and generating a list of authors who commonly do this.
Hopefully this particular post will serve to slow down this abuse.
Thank you so much for the feed back. Take a look at my blog and you can see what is in progress on these subjects.
I look forward to seeing your post
Have you done the math yet once one of the posts you have bought upvotes for paid out to see if you actually made any profit? I know with minnowbooster you usually will see a (small) profit but with most of the vote bid bots the average user actually loses money by the time the curation fees are removed from post payout. While there are lots of abusers of the system, I am not sure @transisto is one - this isn't as clear cut as you might assume (as you will find out is the case for many things on Steem). He was actually a leading opponent of self-voting abuse for a long time, and has only recently started self-upvoting as a way to fund some project development that will directly add value to Steem. And yes, I know this post I am linking does not spell out what that is - but I am 100% certain that what he is saying in this post is legit: https://steemit.com/steem/@transisto/temporarily-pausing-my-anti-abuse-efforts-while-sbd-is-off-the-chart
Curious why you linked the @fredrikaa post? SteemPress may be the single most useful thing for growing Steem I have heard of since joining the platform...
Thanks as always Carl for the great feedback.
The math is pretty clear, the payback is well above the cost, so I'm surprised it is not abused even more.
I'm not picking on anybody, there are hundreds of requests into the bid bots at all times, @fredrikaa is not doing anything that everyone else on these bid bots is not doing. For this particular example, a lot of SBD was paid into the post by @devfund to fund this post by @fredrikaa, -- @devfund funds a lot of his post so it is pretty easy to make these connections.
I believe we need to lead by example. Just don't love these types of examples by leaders. It really makes the little guy feel abused. I plan to donate my profit for this post back to the people here on Steemit and I'm really hoping that by discussing this openly can help this abuse be curtailed dramatically to allow true quality to be noticed and rewarded.
Perhaps I''m wasting my time and those in the know don't really want the word out and I'll get spanked for it.
Thanks for listening!
Why do you want us to promote a post of little value? This is bad for the community. As earlier people have said please don't abuse the introduce tag.
I so much agree!
This post will expose such abuse -- Stick with me for a few days and you will see what is in store.
Check the first reply on this post and you'll see another voting abuse I'm exposing.
Okay I understand.
But to be honest I think it's just better to ignore it because now you are instead promoting it. I know you want to do good ;) but think it's just better to be a good example and give real value instead of focus on the negative. Expose stuff usually never works out. Because it cause reactive energy. It creates drama in an endless loop. It creates scarcity. It makes people think win-lose.
We should instead just ignore it and focus on bringing people up. There will always be people that use systems and try to game stuff. But doing the same as them makes you reactive and it just feeds it with more energy. We should use love more and be good examples and that will make people see that there is another way to be. We bring people into win-win by showing real love and be amazing.
Because it doesn't matter how much someone expose there will always be more to expose when you are in that loop. My recommendation is just skip it and focus on bring new Steemians up and skip all that stuff. Since 99% is just normal users that want to hear motivating stuff with 0 negativity. :) Usually things work out by nature the best in the long run automatically!
Have a great day!
@phoneinf -- Thank you very much for this quality reply.
I will be removing the introduceyourself tag pretty soon, as I do not want to abuse this anymore than necessary to prove the point, but in order to produce the final query, I needed this for a bit.
I so much agree on the circle you mention that will just bring more abuse. I don't know the perfect balance.
If you noticed, I donated 150 SBD plus all upvotes on the previous post of this nature.
I will be donating back to the platform as much as I can --- I want Steemit to stick around and we cannot do that without quality -- some of these abuses are simply horrendous and hurting us all.
Turning a blind eye to others abusing the system makes you complicit. I applaud thus guy for speaking up. Takes courage to lead.
Thank you so much for the support. I may really need it!
No its not better to ignore it cause doing so means the abusers get paid to continue what they are doing.
I’ve only recently become aware of benefactor fees and I’m rather mad that they’re not being discussed more openly. Some seem very high. I’m looking forward to your future posts. Thanks for the continuing education!
Thank you so much for the vote of confidence. Sometimes you gotta step out of the comfort zone.
I plan on writing on these abuses -- but no so much in your face as this one. :)
From what I’ve seen there is considerable risk to outing some of these practices and naming and shaming the worst offenders. Aggressive bot driven down voting seems a common response. Then the doxing and flame war follows. Proceed with tact and caution my friend... The right thing to do is seldom the easy thing to do.
You are so very right on this. I know I may get scarred up pretty bad, but my nature does not allow me watch it without speaking out.
We'll see what happens -- Perhaps the community will support this effort or perhaps I'll be enduring a painful and slow death.
Thanks for the support.