Note to @earthnation: Steem is a Community, not a Money Multiplier.
STEEM: Come for the rewards. Stay for the community.
The problem is that some people seem to think differently.
The purpose of this post will be to call out user @earthnation on many things they have done wrong on STEEM, including:
- blatant and repeated comment spamming
- upvote bot abuse
- rewards pool destruction
- claims to "fix" STEEM
and the list goes on.
Big-name Steem users, popular Steemians, whales, and even users who normally don't get along well came together to call out @earthnation on these habits. In this declined payout post, let's explore what @earthnation is doing and why it is not right.
Repetitive Comment Spam
Normally, it's very easy to figure out and identify comment spammers, as they generally simply copy-paste the same poorly worded "very good article, upvote me ?" comment all over Steem.
Now, let's see if you can identify a comment spammer in the screenshot below:
As you can see, @earthnation has pasted the exact same comment with the only difference being "Greetings @username" literally all over Steemit. User @shello found that this comment was copy pasted by @earthnation over 42 times in a row.
Most of the comments were self-voted by @earthnation about ~$0.25 to keep flags from bringing them down, and so they could take up space on the comment feed.
So what's the difference between @earthnation and a Steem comment spammer? I'm not sure.
Abuse of Upvote Bots and Rewards Pool
How is the STEEM Blockchain able to reward users so much cryptocurrency every day? The basis is the rewards pool, a concept pioneered by @steemit involving a pool of cryptocurrency that gets 'created' every single day.
Basically put, each post contains a share of the daily rewards pool. If your post gets upvoted more, that share increases. If other posts get upvoted much more, your share and other users' shares decrease.
Upvote bots are meant to provide minnows and Steemians more visibility and a larger audience on the STEEM Blockchain. They're not meant to push spam up the blockchain or to "multiply money."
To the right, you can see a sample of the votes trickling into an @earthnation post. Notice how so many of the rewards come from upvote bots. In that post specifically, just three upvote bots accounted for over $125 of the rewards.
In other posts, you can see vote bots taking up 80-90% of @earthnation's post rewards. @earthnation doesn't try to gain visibility as a little minnow, in fact they're a relatively rich account with over $5000 loaded in.
@earthnation's abuse of voting bots needs to stop.
Betrayal
One of the most famous scenes in history is when Brutus, Julius Caesar's longtime friend and confidante, betrays him by stabbing him 'in the back' prior to his death.
Can you make a comparison between the theme of betrayal and the screenshots below?
In typical @earthnation fashion, @earthnation flagged basically their only sources of post rewards: voting bots. The voting bots did exactly what they were told to do and behaved to spec, yet their comment received flags from @earthnation.
If I ran a voting bot and my bot behaved properly, yet received flags from a customer, I would probably stop serving that customer altogether.
Outrageous Claims to "Fix Steem"
@earthnation is known for making claims. Claims to help you earn more on STEEM. Claims to allow you more visibility on STEEM. Even claims to help "fix" STEEM.
Users like @shello, @geekgirl, @ats-david, and many more were quick to point out some obvious scams:
And The List Goes On...
It's clear that STEEM and @earthnation in their current states are not going to get along with each other.
Please, @earthnation, heed the loads of advice you've gotten in your replies and comments from very well-respected Steemians. Many users who don't even get along well have come together against you.
For a "lover of STEEM" it's very funny how @earthnation is powering down... ;)
Thanks for reading,
— @mooncryption
image sources: earthnation comment thread
disclaimer: I will say that all the opinions in this post are my own. But I will add that the majority of the STEEM community and many respected Steemians hold similar or the same opinions of @earthnation as well.
Hi @mooncryption! We stopped commenting repetativley after receiving feedback from the steem community~. Also, we unflagged all bot comments and havn't flagged any comments since.
Were sorry if any of our posts offended you. Our steemit bot defender post was an honest attempt to offer a solution to steem that otherwise did not exist.
Our recent show posting we boosted by about 70 dollars. After the boost, several hundred people up-voted us and increased the value of our posting by almost 100 more dollars!
There are many steemians who really love our inspiring and engaging posts.
We are here to add value, love, awareness and consciousness to steem. We are also promoting steem on other social media outlets, we have a steem guild for new steemians to get started, and we use our voting power to upvote our minnows that use the earthnation tag.
Were doing the best we can here to add value to the community. We bought our steem from blocktrades with btc as an investment into steem. We don't intend to power down past 5000.
How can we help heal this? Would any of you like to get on a video call with a couple of our coordinators?
We truly only want to add value to this community. There are quite a few other accounts that are using bots too.... It's part of the growing steem culture. I think the entire steem community (ourselves included) is trying to find a good balance between organic upvotes/bot upvoting.
When you notice the fact that OP is "Moon" and the spammer is "Earth"...
Coincidence?
This one made me laugh :P
the problem is that they have just dug in heels and pretended innocence. not to mention they say they looooove steem so much.... yet they power down, after making a cool grand off of the upvote bots since they joined 22days ago
@zyten, now this is the real "coincidence? I think not."
Can't wait for tomorrow ;)
@mooncryption Actually I was merely intrigued by the similarity in names. Honest :D. I only just joined today and thus felt that I don't know enough about the platform to comment on the topic itself. That being said, now I am curious to see what sort of response will come out of "Earth" ^^
:) Welcome to Steem! Hope you're having a great time here. Lots of us bring different personalities, most of us are nice and polite, though you may run into the infrequent (or sometimes frequent) comment spammer as you can see in my post.
If you're having any trouble, feel free to comment on any of my posts or reach out to me on Discord (id:
mooncryption#6603). Have fun!That's encouraging! Thank you! I've decided to spend some time lurking before actually sharing stuff though. At this point, I have pretty much no idea what sort of information can contribute to the community. I'm still digesting what sort of social media Steemit is becoming TBH. BTW, I found out that unicode emojis work in Steemit posts and comments. You might want to check them out too~ I was hoping that Github style emojis like :smile: would work since they're easier to remember but for the time being I'll make do with these 😁😁😁
😀 Nice! You can post anything on Steem as long as it isn't spam :P
Perhaps you have a niche like crypto trading, art, science, etc; lots of people post about categories like that. Maybe you just want a blog to categorize events in your life, anything works on Steemit.
I think I'll do just that XD. Thank you!!
All they had to do was say sorry, and try to fix it. Claim innocence followed by more BS is insincere. The first user I've ever seen turn against not only the Steemians who tried to help them out, but the bots that helped them too. IMHO, earthnation made enemies of everyone who lent a hand.
You bring up some good points. Hopefully, bots and spamming like this get weaved out in the near future.
Perhaps @berniesanders could go after this person instead of other random people who happened to rub him the wrong way.
Thankfully, @berniesanders did reply to them a lot and he called them out. Bernie claims that he'll have enough SP to "nuke" the account by tomorrow, let's see what happens :)
It's not a claim, he's gonna do it. Bernie unlike other users isn't BS, he actually does what he says c:
EDIT: Go buy your snacks now @mooncryption!
Already have my popcorn! Hopefully this show doesn't flop ;) I have a feeling it'll be pretty good
It's about to be so lit~
destroy all bots.
Now this is one service that behaves in one of the ugliest way in the dog-eats-dog scenario.
Using others for climbing purpose, and then literally squashed them.
This has nothing to do with bots as some has mentioned "destroy all bots" here; it has everything to do with the mindset and the heart of the owner of that account that has executed really bad business practice.
I personally liked using the bots especially when I run out of VP and I want to bless someone who's post is worthy of a good upvote, and occasionally I use that service for myself (not the accused service) so that I can gather a little more and pay it forward later.
I do not see it is wrong when one needs a little help in financial help without abusing the system, which unfortunately, not only this particular "competitor" is doing, there are a HUGE group of minnows are doing the same with totally horrible content.
Maybe if the services have a better underlining rules to offer their services (like for those that only upvote 1 account once a day), people are less abusive.
Bottom line, again and again, it is the issue of the human heart. You can literally see the personality of the service / whoever use them.
Since this is a non paying post, I won't waste my upvote, and I will just resteem it @mooncryption
Of course! Your resteem was appreciated :)
You're right, one of the sickest things is that this user took advantage of the bots, then flagged them. If the bots had feelings, they would be pretty mad, and I'm sure if the owners of the bots knew about this they'd be pretty mad as well.
Wow...you raised some serious issues here and with your prooves ...cannot agree more...I think many know steemians are guilty of same even those who flag others claiming to be saints with their army of upvotes and downvotes upvote their comments...this self upvote should stop so that it should go for curating good contents...if not many genuine contents writers will keep being undervalued while some spam their post thru comments earning far more than the writer themselves which leads to many less interested to invest time on blogging here...nice work...need to expand it to others on daily basis
Thanks :) We need to keep Steem for those who actually want to use it properly, not comment spammers or abusers, you're right.
sure...many of us who invest time to write with no value prefer to use our time on crypto trading now since steemit has been taking over by upvote bots and spammers...but with folks like you, i guess @ned will do something about this... however, steemit is a decentralized platform where people can interact and curate like normal social media...forming alliances with families and friends...but since there is gains to make in curation, then it should be monitored to avoid abuse... thanks once more for sharing...
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STOPI guess they could not take the heat..
You spoke for me also, a small redfish that saw/had some issues with them.
Thank you for seeing through their carefully,(maybe not so carefully) crafted veil.