This thread had about 60 comments, all with ~3400 votes from the same voting trail that seems to be lead by @ecoworld .
I've probably made some enemies here , and it cost me a lot of vote power to do it - but this is just complete spam, draining the reward pool for content that has no value to anybody.
I'm sure there are many other threads with the same method being used.
Any help would be appreciated putting a stop to this bullshit - my vote power is smashed and it's time for my 4am powernap.
Next target :
Great job! I've been flagging quite a few spammers today actually. I found one and went all the way down his copy/paste comments and flagged every one of them that had an upvote. I'm just too tired of this crap to try and educate anymore. It's not like they want to hear it anyway.
It is a shame about the voting power though, I had to turn down the weight of my flag quite a bit.
@playfulfoodie @em3 @ausbitbank @barrydutton @clayboyn @blueorgy @gregory-f please check these too:
https://steemit.com/raspberry/@ubg/how-to-set-up-a-curation-bot-on-raspberry-pi (over 2k upvotes on comments)
https://steemd.com/@mug
(4 days ago) seem to just be going back to old posts which no one will read (e.g. see chemtrails/@sunset)
https://steemd.com/prepping/@hack-the-planet/re-fema-re-paradise-found-re-huggybear-hey-steembears-huggybear-coming-at-ya-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-like-there-is-no-tomorrow-20170723t180230374z
(3 days ago below)
https://steemd.com/prepping/@beast-computer/re-fema-re-paradise-found-re-huggybear-hey-steembears-huggybear-coming-at-ya-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-like-there-is-no-tomorrow-20170723t184026635z
Is this something the steemcleaners team would take down?
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Thanks to both of you...don't give up, THIS is the type of moderation we need!!!
I have flagged a few of these...not blatent like this one, but copypasta crap....but then I saw a member that got retaliated against....
That sucks!
Anyway...supporting all that you can do to make Steemit a healthier and more fruitful platform!!
✌ Peace!!!!
Yeah, the retaliation sucks. For me it's about picking my battles. I can't go up against someone with the same Steem Power, but I can battle the new accounts with low SP, without really feeling the retaliation. I did meet a particularly sore loser earlier this week, but those were just a few minor flags and insults. Reported him to Steemcleaners and that was the end of that :-)
If anyone wants to help on this effort, here is a link to the string of comments mentioned above. Most have been downvoted to nothing, but there are still a few comments with a some earnings left that should be squashed. Click "Show" to reveal the comments with earnings. https://steemit.com/test/@yantarik/test#comments
I'll be searching thru the list of accounts involved in this looking for more abuses and post them here when I find any.
Set some flags there too.
https://steemit.com/test/@yantarik/test
It's fucking ridiculous eh? Money that could be rewarding actual users is being stolen by greedy whales making circle jerk bots. Glad I vote for @ausbitbank for witness.
Yep I really like that he investigates oddities of the steemit too.
I guess an upvote velocity tracker outside of the defaults would be good for catching these automatically.
yes, fucking ridiculous.
Always agreed with this!
New exploit report (this time autocomments)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sigmundfreud/steem-auto-comment-exploit-uncovered-80-000sbd-since-hf19
I just got them down to like a few at .05 or .04 cents each, hopefully someone finishes them off.
Keep up the good work :)
it would be great if there was a syndicate that would intervene when righteous Spam flags are retaliated against by the spammer : that should trigger an avalanche of flags to the spammer profile so his profile gets burned to the ground. It would be very bad for this community to allow spammers not only to spam but on top of That get away with intimidation tactics to scare people into not flagging...
Spam should be flagged
Anti flag intimidation by spammers should be squared flagged !
An example should be set to show the spammers what happens .
That would be super useful for anyone who is counter flagged by a spammer ; if the spammer doesn't remove the counterflag then the legitimate flagger can point to this example case of spammer profiles BEING BURNED TO THE GROUND by the community!!
I think that is already how it partially works. Atleast for the newer accounts with low Steem Power. The problems come when it's an account with high SP doing the abusing. If you have a bad whale here, hardly anyone would stand up against them, especially non-whales. We'd be too afraid of retaliation from them, due to them basically being able to blast you down to zero. Counter flag or not, it would ruin your account.
Sure, we as a community could burn his/her reputation to the ground, but he/she/it can take a lot of us down with him/her/it.
Retaliation from a low SP holder doesn't hurt too much and if it gets bad enough, any respectable member can ask the community for help in chasing this person off. It's when you stumble upon a rich prick who's a sore loser that you get into trouble either way...
I say what's right is right and we should blast them all regardless of SP (says the minnow) It's fun to watch @dan and @freedom get involved and stomp on bad whales
Hey you, good job, nice to see your comments and work paying you back here also PF!!
Thanks @barrydutton! Nice to see you show up here :D
I like you, I miss hearing from you LOL.
I love seeing newer people grow on here and find their way, it makes me happy!
Aww thanks so much! Though I don't really feel like I'm growing anymore. More competition makes for hardly any eyes on my posts lately!
New Exploit Report: Auto comment voting
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sigmundfreud/steem-auto-comment-exploit-uncovered-80-000sbd-since-hf19
Good Lord.
I too have flagged quite a bit mostly for pure copy and paste aswell i flag my vote power is down to 12.5%
so if anyone reading this fells sorry for me (or if you think i should just not care) you could make me fell better by following :) i dont care about you upvoting really i just want people to get only good content so ill keep flagging spam
but good job @playfulfoodie and @ausbitbank
Yeah, I made this 'mistake' before and got down to 2% from flagging...thats when I learned flagging eats your voting power too! :-(
I still did it some today after reading this post...but refused to go below 40%. I havent been back to 100% since the day I joined...
Between upvoating everyone and flagging.....😜
Peace fellow Curator Officers!!
✌
Sorry my friend @jackfitton
How can i know my voting power ?
You can use this tool to monitor your voting power
https://steemnow.com/
Your power is 62.62% at the moment
Thanks a lot for your help dear bro @deirdyweirdy
@ahmedezzat steemd.com/@yourname
Thanks a million @jackfitton
I'm new to steemit and do not really understand what is going on but I do have a way I deal with spammers anywhere. I don't get too many here since I am a minnow, but when I do, I send the most appropriate of these three comments back:
QUOTE:
You are not supposed to ask for followers here at steemit. Search for "how to comment on posts" for ideas. But in general - write a few sentences about what you see in the post and tell the person if you upvoted or resteemed to help them. Then they might follow you anyway. Good luck!
OR
You are not supposed to ask for votes here at steemit. Search for "how to comment on posts" for ideas. But in general - write a few sentences about what you see in the post and tell the person if you upvoted or resteemed to help them. Then they might follow you anyway. Good luck!
OR
Look up "how to comment at steemit" so you can learn what they like here. The big guys will crush you if the see this type of comment repeatedly. You need at least one sentence and it needs to say something specific about the post you are on. Three sentences is even better! Good luck :)
END
I use copy/paste (!) to send these replies, but I do alter each a bit. I get about a 50% reply and most often that reply asks me to explain what I mean. They don't realize they are doing something wrong. I assume the other 50% are real spammers so they do not answer.
I've been doing this same thing with different wording for spammers in my email, fb, and Twitter for years and I get a very similar return of about 50%.
I open at least 200 posts a day on steemit and comment on 30-50. I have noticed in the last days that the spam is getting grayed out. Previously I rarely saw gray on the spam.
I want to thank all of you who are helping in this effort. I was wondering how posts with only a video and one line of text or a link with one line of text were getting $50+ payouts and I guess now I know.
I came here for the alexa ranking and useless comments on dumb posts make things look bad. The awesomely great content here should be what rises to the top, and I hope it will by your efforts. I'm happy to see no downvotes on this post. That gives me encouragement.
Thanks for your awesome reply @fitinfun! That's a nice idea of the copy/paste comment to reply to spammers. I have something similar lately, though I admit that I don't use it a lot. I got so tired of the spamming that I basically just flag those comments now, making them greyed out.
I'm sure it is magnitudes worse for you than me - I might only get one spam on a day or a post, so it's no trouble. but if I had 20, I might very well be on your page.
Thank you for all your efforts. We little guys are too confused and small to help much!
Good on ya girl. But do not over tire yourself. The balance will come.
Yeah, I'm not on a witch hunt just yet! When I come across such things though, I will definitely keep on flagging.
Yeah the idea is to publish original content.
It always is... on your blog, on websites, on youtube.... fb... all places. Original content, then sharing it and like it. But always when money comes in place or other ponzi fonzi schemes... there always be trollers or people who profit from others naivety.
Here is about the money... but if the sistem works, they will be gone soon.
That's the whole point of theese new sistems. Hope it works.
As a newbie this thing suckss.
Report and smash those people
Doing what I can within my limits :-)
Just now I had someone commenting on three of my posts in quick succession. I'm sure he/she/it didn't actually read the posts, but he/she/it did post an appropriate comment to the theme of the post, so I'm not sure how to handle this one yet.
Spammers should be cleaned like mosquitos
You mean like Iceland?
This post received a 3.1% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @wolo! For more information, click here!
stupid bug, you go SQUISH now! -> stupid spammer, you go SQUISH now!
Lol ... yes
Exactly! :)
gg homer, come here now :-) and bring your kids too, they are very good to squash things, hehe
"Pure linear reward curve!" they said. "What could go wrong?" they said.
I respect you for using up your voting power for this shit. I just had to use a lot of mine to flag every post on this catfish's account. I wasn't powerful enough to strip them of all the rewards though.
There is a ton of abuse happening now, and I think we all need to set aside a percentage of our voting power just to flag this type of shit that's popping up everywhere, because if we don't send a strong message that it won't be tolerated, it will only get ten times worse as more people join and take their cue from these greedy little fuckers.
If anyone would like to help remove the rewards from this faker, the profile link is here. They are using an athlete's instagram photos and claiming to be her. I suspect that most of these catfish accounts are probably owned by the same handful of people. They wouldn't be making any money if pathetic dudes stopped upvoting photos just because there is a woman in it. I mean, wtf is this shit becoming, Snapchat?
https://steemit.com/@praju-starlet
I added a few downvotes to her(his?) posts as well. Good catch.
Thanks for that. I just went and had another look at the account. They have lost most of their rewards, other than a decent paid introduce yourself post, but it doesn't even seem to have affected them at all. They have still posted like 20 "nice post" comments in the last half an hour lol.
I'm starting to wonder if these castfish accounts could be automated? At least to a degree..
Flagged @ecoworld just a few days ago and flagged with you on this one as well.
I bet you're simply just going to find more and more and more of these spammers as time goes on. People are getting so smart these days and there s a select group of people that will always just exploit good things no matter the cost.
Do you think there will be a way in the future maybe that will help project against this?
I think the most important thing right now is for us decent people to show that we don't agree with the spam by flagging them. Ruin their reputation and their earnings so they know there isn't anything to gain from what they are doing.
There should be a better way to stop these people. Steemit isn't truly decentralized, right? @ned could change something that eliminates these characters. I don't care for regulation, but also can't locate and punch these turkeys in the face. There is so much vote power being wasted on policing the site versus rewarding content. @ausbitbank
Agreed. We need a hypothetical mathematical model that demonstrates the damage done over time to Steem through self-voting at different degrees:
Percentage of users doing it 0-100%.
Frequency of ave user doing it 0-100%
Measured impacts on Steem economy in terms of growth of:
A. Steem users,
B. STEEM value
C. Steem morale
D. Any other metric
We need to make our case and do public education.
That would be great, but I think part of what makes Steemit Steemit is the fact that it's run by its members mainly and curated by its members. We're all part of a nice little experiment about the mess that is humanity! :-)
Well said :)
Full power upvote on this post, you have always done a good job helping this community @ausbitbank
Sent this to Steemit.Abuse channel today, the spammy spammersons are really bad these days...
I thought I would provide you this. I am not sure how we are going to win the race against spam every day, with 270k accounts. I don't know code LOL ---- https://steemit.com/@chelsea20/comments
Hopefully a couple people can head to that page and deal with this also.
Went to the one link, says page does not exist now?
Is it really shut down LOL!?
--
https://steemit.com/hi/@xzibit
That just means the comment is not reachable. Their page is:
https://steemit.com/@xzibit
But their account is as good as shutdown haha
I made a typo, fixed the link now
Here's another reason I wish my voting power was higher. I have very little to give back in the form of upvotes for quality content much less to fight spammers. I hope to join this effort in the future after I have a bit more voting power. Thank you for what you are using your voting power for. It is obviously needed and hopefully many others will get involved and nip this in the bud quickly.
For what it's worth you've got my upvote. This was a good read.
@ausbitbank always put the interest of the platform first. Welldone.
Amazing let's flag them all, they have to be all blocked on steemit, even their ip adress to not access the website again, I am also so tired from spammers that are asking to follow them, they are thinking that they will succeed that way, hell no !
Here are two people I think are gaming the system and why:
majorleaguemarc Well maybe not his account but his likers. He sends a couple of dollars to many different accounts who intern upvote his terrible posts like "Things always get better;That's how life works. Smile" These other account have at max 1-2 posts each.
hellosteem Either this is a dev account or someone decided posting test hundreds of times is going to make them rich
Also https://steemit.com/@shahaalam19 who spams the comments and makes posts of a picture copied of the internet.
There's a lot of that here @me-shell, and the fact it gets a payout is discouraging.
If you add an @ symbol to the front of their username people can use it to go straight to the user's profile.
Yeah I do flag accounts that are just plagiarizing and then report to steemcleaners as well, but I never saw anything like this, Im a minnow but I'll look on that thread to see if I can help
Wherever is money involved, there will be abuses. Nice job.
That is an abomination and should be opposed. Thank you for taking your precious voting power to conquer that. Is there anything I can do? My vote doesn't do much but maybe there is another thing to help.
Thank you @ausbitbank for getting rid of these abusers.
I thought these trails were gone but it seems like it still continues.
I've been trying to flag spammers as well as people who just comment 'nice post'.
The worst thing that happened to me was when I was opening up about a friend that had passed away and a guy posted 'haha funny post'.
I hope we can rat out all these people and have a great community
Wow! I've seen someone do something similar in the past, with numbered comments and upvoting each between two accounts, but not with a voting trail of this magnitude. I flagged it, no doubt. The fact that people would do this is incredibly frustrating, as it's just draining the pool for everyone putting time and genuine work into the platform. Thanks for your work in flagging this.
Fantastic job, buddy. It's good to know we still got a great community of upstanding steemians ready to deal with this crap.
Thank you.
@ausbitbank Check @ydauti also. He is a spammer/flagger like the above .
Thanks, another one down
You did well! Thanks for your job @ausbitbank, take my upvote and my follow.... If I see others I will do the same.
Steemit has to grow through quality!!!
Great job keep it up steemit needs people like you !!!
Glitzy :))
and clean that is what we need on steemit ;)
3400 Accounts ? How is this possible ? Dont you need a phone Number to create a Account ?
let's go get em... enough with this spam, scams and cheating!
kudos!
and what do we see hundreds and hundreds of fake accounts voting in alphabetic order... it pains my eyes!!!
I've joined flagging @yantarik's comments, my voting power doesn;t do too much damage, though!
Looking into this after a good night's rest.
I see some have joined flagging, good!, and this scheme seems to have halted operations.
It brings up a few more accounts that were obviously created to do the same. User @yarmolnik has set up a chain of numbered comments 2 days ago. If the culprit follows the same pattern, these will start being upvoted shortly before rewards get paid out. See their [recent comment].
This needs to be monitored, I'll keep it under check, but my VP will not suffice to kill the payouts!
edit:self-upvoting my previous comment for visibility... mehSeriously! This type of garbage is what the account @steemit should be used for and @cheetah bot.
Why hasn't @cheetah been summoned on this spam?
I can't do anything. 3000+ upvotes and $7 needs whale involvement
I (and thus @cheetah) don't have anywhere near enough influence to combat this stuff alone. I'm just a normal community member like any other, there are no special privileges on the blockchain.
Cheetah is mostly an alert bot, check out the FAQ if you haven't yet!
Interesting side note -- cheetah only performs 1% votes, yet she sits at less than 50% voting power constantly. Nuts!
I'd bet we could get a lot of volunteers to manually hunt down and downvote abuses of the system. Is there a way we could be set up anonymously as a proxy 1 day per week? Just set up anonymous accounts and delegate enough SP to do downvote damage. I would help out with that. I use my own account now to flag, but a separate proxy account (setup by steemit?) would help. I could max downvote for one day, and let the account build back up the rest of the week. If you get a hundred people willing to downvote abuses for one day per week with delegated SP, we might make a dent.
That is quite interesting, but honestly, i'm not too shocked.
Scrolling the "New" tab would reveal the massive amount of spam-
@cheetah doesn't really handle spam. It's mainly for plagiarism alerts.
Well then @steemit sounds like a good option. The developers account should be utilized for this. The spam is what will destroy this platform and this should warrant its use.
we need a spambot :)
You got my witness vote.
I was wondering what was happening to the whale experiment, and here is need for it exposing it's self.
This is why the rewards have diminished soooo much?
Voted and resteemed.
How is your voting power smashed?
Thanks! Flagging uses vote power just like upvoting, and it took 20%+ each to smash down almost 100 comments now :(
This isn't something I can do full time, and steemcleaners does a great job but we really need more people with SP to be willing to use it flagging abusers like this..
We will help you out! I was looking for such a community.
meep
source: deviantart.
Anyways. If the signature of the this type of abuse is the amount of upvotes, it should be fairly easy to write a bot to identify potential abusers. Many third party steem services already count the number of upvotes, so i'll leave t to them to reuse/reorganize their code rather than reinvent the wheel.
However that said, if a hoard of bots is all that it takes to shut down a user. Then someone could use bots to mass upvote legit speakers, particularly those who speak about certain contraversial topics, just for the purpose of administratively shutting them down.
If such abuses continue. The system will likely have to be changed to a maximum of the top n upvotes, or a percentage (perhaps declining as the number of votes increase) past n.
meep
Dropped some flags on them for ya. Thanks for letting every know.
Self-vote abuse on commentaries
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sigmundfreud/steem-auto-comment-exploit-uncovered-80-000sbd-since-hf19
@xzibit
This makes me sick. I work hard at creating really good content for my niche and I can have 60+ votes and still only make -$20.00 and like for example my last post after 7 hours had 15 votes and I was only at 0.40 so its guys like this that ruin this entire good thing. Greed. Thank you for find this out. STEEMIT should have bots looking for patterns like this.
I'm tracking something similar, although it's just the spam, no real rewards to speak of yet. Looks like potentially a similar bot-net:
https://steemit.com/spam/@lexiconical/who-is-kibbjez-serial-spammer-of-vote-bot-net-operator-harmless-programmer
There should be some kind of method put in place where we can stop blatant abuse without it draining the voting power of others. If all the decent people who care about the community spend so many votes on preventing abuse, they won't be able to provide anything to the real content creators and more of the reward pool will go to "scratch your back if you scratch mine" and the abusers who don't get caught.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have done what you did, but I wish there were other ways of preventing this that weren't so costly. What about nominating abusers for freezing their accounts the way we nominate witnesses but without cost to vp? Or two kinds of flagging where a certain high number of non-botany non multiple accounts agree on freezing....but I guess no way to determine what's a multiple account...maybe if 15 witnesses agree that it's abuse...? Something like that?
How much was he making before you stepped in? @clayboyn told me when he got there it was at .20 per comment
New exploit report: auto comment vote
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sigmundfreud/steem-auto-comment-exploit-uncovered-80-000sbd-since-hf19
I'm now to the point of flagging, vote power be damned. I know when I try to educate, I'm only talking to a bot anyway. Good find @ausbitbank.
Good job man. Although I am a proponent of the free market and allowing everyone to do whatever they want, I support these initiatives because I bust my ass creating quality content and sure will put my foot ahead if I see such abuse.
Wow - I can't believe they thought they could just post numbers in the comments and no-one would notice.
Unbelievable.
Steemit is a quantitative system that purports to be a qualitative one by means of self correction via curation, in much the same way that financial & stock markets are argued to operate as naturally self correcting via competition and supply/demand. In both cases we have seen that in fact there exists opportunity to exploit the system for personal gains by means of manipulation, collusion, counterfeit, etc.
It is a real shame that it costs to flag inappropriate content or abuse of the system, as this discourages the moderating hand of the curator in much the same way that the march of the million-click-bait plagiarists & generic content (re)posters discourages efforts for original authorship.
Thanks for making a stand, wish you didn't have to throw yourself under the bus to do so.
Least I could do is
^ voteGood job on smashing these spammers. We need the reward pool for those of us that actually try to create good content and are trying to give back to the community.
Good point.
I have followed you because you started that you are trying to create good content. I am too and this is what I want to encourage. Thank you.
That's a great job, thank you for sacrificing your time. Can you tell us how we can help?
If you have some steem power and see stuff like this, flag it or drop it in #steemcleaners-linkdrop on steemit.chat. We also need to police this where we can, or all of us are slowly being robbed by people that contribute nothing
what if steemit developers could change the way mute is counted , if enough people would mute them they would run out of rep , and there wouldn't be a need to waste voting power on flagging each post they make.
excellent idea! A mute is a clear signal of bad behaviours and 1000'sof mutes should be a clear signal that the account n not valuable to the community so it SHOULD affect reputation !
l think that this is a crucial point to educate the community : this behaviour is straight-up THEFT from EVERY legit member. Many people might not realize how the reward pool works...
this is really disgusting, and I didn't know about it till just now.
I want to thank you for doing this, and helping Steemit! I might have to start this too, because I see this as a HUGE problem.....If we don't do anything, it will just turn into a giant scheme/shithole. This is worth fighting for.
Resteeming this post to 14,000+ followers.
ln replying to @creatr 's post on a feature request for a threshold for memo notifications
it occurred to me that you can't try to manually solve an automation abuse. Maybe a solution is an exponential cost for posting?
I would like to see this implemented for posts actually. But an exponentially growing cost for posting. The first of the day maybe .001, second 0.01 third 0.1 sbd 4th costs 1 whole SBD 5th post 10 SBD 6th 100 SBD and so forth.
Or maybe a fairer system would be the equivalent measured against % upvote value.
This way spamming becomes prohibitively expensive but it would not overly penalise quality posters who post 4 good posts a day.
Money could go to the @null account like promotion.
Why exponential cost ? When spammers can harvest a few dozen SBD per post with autovoting bots 0,01 SBD is laughable and won't stop anything. Posting should have an exponential cost so that a human won't be penalized but a spam bot posting hundreds of posts a day to game the rewards System gets severely punished without human intervention.
Trying to manually flag spam accounts, that's like swatting mosquitos and it costs voting power which is unfair. You can't solve manually the automated abuses.
There needs to be a systemic built-in circuit breaker on abusive bot behaviour or they will suck this platform dry .
my posts have the same spams like that.
Doesn't it cost Steem to make an account? Unless you prove your identity or something. How did he do this?
Have you paid to make an account? We all make it free here. They will always be, it depends how we treat them, flag them, make them go in spam or whatever we can.
I didn't pay. But how can you make this many accounts? I had to wait a few days for my account to be approved.
Good job!
3400?! That's insane.
Well done!
good job , don"t give up
Good for you! I wish all the BS being done here could be stopped! It would be wonderful if Steemit was only used as intended and not driven by greed.
Well it looks like they are on notice. Flagging of this spam crap needs to occur more often so we eradicate this from the platform. Great job!
@steemit admin is there Way to put. Logic that you can only reply on other comment not on yours? Honestly. Not certain we cant stop people from doing this because... This is decentralize??? Or if someone from steem admin can do the logic that i suggest.
You can only reply if others place comment.you cannot place comment or reply on your own post
This doesn't fix the issue though, these guys have at least 3k accounts and can just comment on each other to avoid that so it's only inconveniencing legit users
Great work catching up with these spammers, thanks for flagging them