This is a really interesting initiative @paulag. I suspect you will learn a lot from it that goes beyond "saving" accounts.
A friend of mine joined steemit 1 month ago today and he already has 101 followers. However, I just went through the first page of his followers (50) and muted every single one for him, except me, as they were all spam.
He works really long hours so doesn't have much time for engagement at this point but I thought if he got started posting once a day he could build his account slowly.
But now I'm not so sure. All his followers are low rep, posting hourly sometimes, posts with just an image, following tens of thousands of accounts even though they've only been here themselves a short time and if they're not posting spam content they're just resteeming other spam content.
If I was him I would find no reason to stay at all.
I only joined last December but my first 100 followers were mostly people. This is a massive change in a short space of time.
No wonder people leave, although I would guess most of the people leaving are just spam accounts anyway.
@gillianpearce that you for your comment as it is very interesting. Having worked online for many years now I know how much time and effort it takes to grow a blog and understand how hard it is to find a niche that is interested or finds value in what I have to say. Steemit is no different. Many of the followers I had at the start we low rep accounts, but as time passed these accounts have grown, just like mine has. I am here nearly a year.
If most of the people leaving are spam accounts then good, but lets not lose good accounts when we dont have to.
maybe you would like to point your friend over to this post?
I think the main point I was making was how much things have changed, for the worse, since I joined in December. That's what shocked me most.
These are my musings, not my friends. He is content to plod on for now because he's seen the success I've had.
From my perspective it's not so much that these are low re accounts. I agree with you it takes time and effort to build a blog and most of my early followers were low rep too but these accounts following him are blatant spam. They are not simply low rep accounts that will improve with time.
However, if you have found 500+ that are genuine people trying to make a go of it then I agree, the more of those you can save the better and good riddance to the spam accounts.
I look forward to hearing your report in a months time and it will be interesting to see what my friends account looks like then.
In the meantime, I'm going to go through all those that are following him and report as many as I can to Steemcleaners. 😊
so so much has changed, you are correct. Aswesome work on helping this guy/gal and spending the time reporting the accounts to steemcleaners. we need more people doing stuff like that :-)