2700 Accounts Love Spam Comments! Is This a Case of Gaming the System or Abuse?

in #steemit-abuse7 years ago

It seems that @ecoworld has found a huge following to upvote his numbered comments! 2700 users love the fact that he posts numbered comments under his own posts!

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Now are these his bots or do we have another @steemitmarket out there with votes for hire? A quick look at steemd.com shows most if not all of these accounts were created by @steem with delegation. I spot checked, no I didn't look at all 2700 accounts. 😝

Unfortunately steemviz.com pending payout calculator isn't working correctly with the number of comments made by this guy today to show the pending payout. I do know that when I check yesterday it was over $100.

A quick check shows he's gearing up for another round.

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What do you think? Abuse, just gaming the system or legitimate use of steemit.com as intended?

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Without a doubt this is considered spam and subject to flagging.

I agree. It's pretty much interface and network spamming.

I agree. This should be flagged

something tells me you would be in for a world of hurt if you flagged it tho...

Yeah, I don't have enough SP/Rep to counter that!

This is bad on so many levels, First all 2700 accounts were created using SP delegated to them from @steem at 6 steem per account that is alot drained from OUR rewards pool

Then he is spamming, using up a ton of Bandwidth on blockchain for nothing but fraud.

Then on his payouts he is again taking away from the same rewards pool that you and I are all getting our payouts from.. So when our payouts on posts are going down, its guys like this that are helping to lower OUR payouts.

Exactly my thoughts (and frustration )

This is fucked up and certainly abuse. I don't think it is healthy for the platform to tolerate something like that. What are possible solution to this except flagging?

That's a good question. I'm actually not sure. When the SP is delegated and not owned by the account there could be a mechanism put into place for reporting this type of abuse to have that SP delegated be revoked?

Of course with any solution we come up with, we have to ask ourselves if the solution could be abused as well.

I don't see how this could be legitimate; this is pure spam.

I see it as abuse on a few different levels @ecoworld does control all the accounts.

They are removing $100+ each week from the reward pool and only up-vote their own comments. Had they purchased the steem instead of it being delegated I would see this as a lesser problem. I'm personally still on the fence about up-voting your own comments in general.

Some of these accounts are newly created. There are users in the #help channel of steemit.chat just waiting to get an account to start posting and being a part of the community.

This could indeed turn into an issue of spam were more users have the means to signup such a large amount of accounts through the website and receive delegated STEEM.

And I have to wonder how they did it. I just checked 50 of those upvotes and they are on accounts created in the last two weeks! Several more that I checked were created since the middle of June.

It's a big issue. In the next HF I believe this will be addressed and the way accounts are created will be changed; however for the accounts that exist today I'm not sure if there's anything that could be done to stop that besides having a whale bot that can blacklist such accounts and auto flag their spammy posts until they eventually give up on doing that.

i don't understand how he has 2700+ votes, maybe he has 2700 accounts under a bot program?

Most likely. There are those that have published bot scripts for us to use. I have set up a bot for @zoee to follow my votes in the past.

The bigger question is how did he get control of 2700 accounts and some of them recently created.

That is something I am wondering too. How to get so many accounts?

There's got to be some way to introduce a test to prevent bot-like commenting (that isn't helpful - I understand some bots here are genuinely good), this kind of "numbers station" posting for gains is pretty blatant.

What is the solution?

Pool some rewards for humans to police the system? Its hard to delegate things to people because then an incentive to cheat the system is created.

@steemcleaners does handle comment spam whether it is bot or human. This person was actually reported for comment spam. I didn't log it since I'm not sure that spamming only yourself constitutes abuse. You're right about the upvoting for gain, that isn't something @steemcleaners handles.

Some comment spam falls into a grey area. Is the comment spam? That requires us to "moderate" content in some cases which we try to avoid if it isn't abuse outlined in our guide.

Is @ionlysaymeep spam? I like @ionlysaymeep personally and so does some of the community.

I think that the community is going to have to make their own decisions on what they will accept for the most part. Otherwise you ask a group of people to moderate the content of comments.

Yes, @ionlysaymeep is spam, as is the other one just like it that only says "bork". It's tolerable spam, for now, but imagine 15,000 people all thinking that's a good idea and setting up their own spambot. There are 2 of them now, I don't see any reason why anyone wouldn't do it. It's free money.

Well, that's three now that I know of. @iliketoast

Since we don't know them all that tells me that they are keeping their comments relatively in check. I rarely see a meep or toast comment and I don't recall ever seeing bork.

Next level irony from the toastmaster in reply to this comment here.

pretty ballsy move tbh

@iliketoast is now the meta of spam commenting.

Might be one of those bots you have to call to the post by mentioning it.

Perhaps the content of the comments themselves do not have to be necessarily moderated. After all, the platform is designed to showcase content that is upvoted ect.

However, there is no way 2700 people are upvoting @ecoworld for posting numbers.

Clearly, this is abuse. Steem is about benefiting from the community as well as contribution to the community.

@ecoworld has found a way to benefit from the community at the expense of the community

Yeah, other than adding empty transactions to the block chain I don't think one can spam oneself. I don't pretend to understand whether or not there is a problem with "block chain" bloat.

I was told that this topic was brought up in #witness. Maybe someone will take on the task of proposing something that may prevent this in the future. Whether it is the ability to remove SP delegated by @steem or a closer look at the signup process.

I see abuse. Ridiculously so

Release the hounds.

These kind of things are injurious to the system. It is not beneficial for the community.

Clear abuse, for spam reasons alone, if nothing else. Good catch. It seems to indicate you can get slightly more than a dollar per vote per (a bit under) 1000 accounts you register and abuse. That's 10$, per day, per 1000 accounts, roughly. High enough to be compelling in many jurisdictions, I would guess.

In my opinion is pure spam!

This adds no value to steemit. The delegated sp should be withdrawn from those bot accounts.

That's some of the strangest spam I've ever seen... did he really create 2800 accounts???

Not sure. It has been done in the past by others before the new signup process. It's also possible they paid others to signup and transfer the account as well as out right purchasing them.

That's a spam