RE: BEWARE - I'm FIGHTING Spam In My Comment Section From Now On
Ultimately, this is the only approach that will really work around here. We all have to take appropriate steps to keep our own conversation spaces worth engaging in. Decentralization is the key.
I'm often surprised how valuable the conversation space is on my blog because I've been doing a version of this for quite some time. I often take a screenshot of someone's comments page in my reply as I flag them so everyone can easily see, at a glance, how spammy the commenter is. If more people downvoted ("flagged") then it wouldn't be considered such a taboo and more people would then do it (even though it costs them voting strength). I highly value my voting strength because there are a lot of great content creators here I support, but I still downvote as needed to protect my overall investment and the quality of the ecosystem.
So how about we also start flagging automated bot comments? I'm getting sick of seeing a bunch of comments on a promoted post which are just spam advertising for some bot voting campaign. Let's all send a message to bot owners that we don't care about their spammy comments and they need to find other ways to advertise (and NO, I don't mean use the memo field in transfers).
Ultimately it's a popularity contest, with those who are least popular aspiring to reach the lofty heights of you guys. It's human nature to want to be liked, upvoted, retweeted or whatever the digital platform trend of the day is. Having said this quality content needs to be promoted for this platform to reach its possible potential. Some of us also just wanna be 'social' and have some fun along the way? As a wise fictional character once said, with great power comes great responsibility :) Be happy & smile often my friends :)
very good points. Thanks @lukestokes, i'm glad to hear that I'm not alone having enough with this. I think the spam comment is at a point where new users notice and make them doubt in the viability of the platform.
Currently flagging is more hidden away. Had to Google search for it and I didn’t even find an article showing how to do it. This is also a big reason why people don’t do it since majority barely know you could flag bot automated comments.
Also it looks like it can be a bit risky to start to flag stuff how it may eventually get yourself in trouble. Especially since we are used to the big dictators over at other platforms how they treat you if you speak up.
Since it’s not just a red downvote symbol but a scary flag. But you said a good thing that it’s needed to keep up the quality of the ecosystem since we are all now invested in the Steem Blockchain and it’s in our best interest to keep this place being run well. But if they would tone down the scariness of the red flag I think more people would report stuff.
There has been an on-going discussion with Steemit inc about putting the downvote back as a downvote instead of a flag. It's tricky. But yes, there are still massive whales here who start flag wars and will make every post or comment hidden for someone they don't like if they so choose. It's a tricky thing. When it comes to flagging spam, I think the chance of a flag war is small. If you have concerns, you could also report the account in steemit chat instead of flagging it yourself.
As for the flag being hard to find, that's surprising to hear. It seems pretty straightforward to me.
Good idea! I stopped using up vote bots because of this😏