Draining the Reward Pool - Even SPAM Comments Are Now Getting Huge Upvotes!
Many users might think lately that Steemit isn't fair for one reason or the other. Some Whales are clearly abusing their Steem Power for no reason, just because they have enough SP to do what they want. We need ways to improve this or it will just keep getting out of control.
If this hasn't impacted you personally, you may be fine to stop reading now and move on. But you will realize how serious are these problem, once you face them. If the ideas weren't right, I wouldn't hold on to them.
Lets have a look at the first problem. The misuse of Selfupvote
These are two examples, but there are many others.
I dont have problems with selfupvote if used in the right way, because people have the right to decide, where to put their money. But to upvote spam comments or even many comments in the same day doesnt make any sense. Instead of draining the reward pool, the reward could be used to upvote newcomers or good posts.
When you look at the trending posts, you will find that 25% of the comments are spam comments. One or two of them might be Phishing links. There are many projects out there working against these types of abuses, but they are still out of control. Scammers and spammers have no problems making thousands of accounts on a daily basis and upvoting each other. Flagging brings down reputation scores when the flagger has a higher score than the one being flagged. Thats why Whales and accounts with higher SP are always responsible in protecting this platform and making it a better place.
The most Spammers are not willing to change their behavior, no matter what new information they get or experience they gain. Even by putting their accounts to 0 to show them how pointless their efforts are, they are still active and spamming. I dont understand if they at all realize what is happening to their accounts or they just dont care. With a little bit of effort and time, we can usually move past this one pretty quickly.
I wanted to raise some awareness about this and ask Users with high SP to save their voting strength to flag these accounts down to a zero reputation or warn them. If whales really care about the rewards pool and how it is distributed, they must look into this and find solutions before it is too late. We have to do everything in our powers to make things at least bit better. Get rid of fraud, plagiarism, hate speech and spam.
Image Source: www.pixabay.com
The real reason you posted this is because you are jealous you cannot do it yourself but I will explain myself however.
Edit 1:
P.S - I have a script running that upvotes everything I post so I do not actually vote by myself.
Edit 2 - Also you could have just contacted me Instead of writing up this bullshit post.
Edit 3 - You say my comments are spam (Which they are not, I will admit the comments I made yesterday were) but you you are also doing the same thing, you just do not have the SP to upvote them.
Upvoted the post because it was hidden.
That is fair, I have no problem with people calling me out etc. I just did not like the way they handled it hence my flag.
P.S - I will continue to upvote myself as long as I am on this stupid bots list. My comments should be seen
@transisto Thank you !
No you are wrong! I am not jealous of anybody here.If I had a chance to upvote myself with 6$ every time I wouldnt do it, because it doesnt make any sense. We are here to share everything together and work together. This platform is supposed to be fun and there should be no hatred or jealousy. And this is not only about you. There are many out there doing the same and I have mentioned that already. This has nothing personal with you or any other person. And thank you for downvoting my posts!
I dont consider my comments as spam and wont upvote them. I wrote in a earlier post that I welcome at least six Newbies everyday and I will always do it.
Good man! It's people like you that will help steemit grow.
Keep up the good work
@kabir88 Thank you
@hanen, thank you for pointing out this issue. If I would make one recommendation is that you try to personalize your greetings to new users in order to make then special.
Many people do consider duplicated welcome messages comment spam and, when something is in doubt, it's better to err on the side of caution.
Also, I invite you to join the @steemflagrewards Discord. We are a group of fellow abuse reporters and fighters that try to take care of each other. We also have a postpromotion channel for abuse related posts. I had shared it on your behalf.
SFR Discord
Ah thats great! I didnt know that it exists :) Will join it now !
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I'm still a plankton, but want the best for us all here as well, and finding ways to drain the reward pool is wrong. I usually don't upvote my own comments (but do upvote my own posts). We all can do a better job of supporting each other and working to take the power away from bad whales...since it looks like there's no complete solution to this problem coming anytime soon.
We need to organise and work together
We need some sort of hashtag / tag to find and follow each other
I flagged a whale a while back and was flagged down to -5 from 40. There wasn't much support from others, but there was no easy way to find others who believed in a more communal steemit.
Ideas welcome
Hopefully things will change soon. Unfortunately you find always users who are just selfish and thinking only about their own benefits. But as many people are aware of these problems, we can hope for a change very soon.
It is getting out of control, I am fairly new to Steemit but it is super difficult to compete.. I see tons of a picture and minimal content at the top.. but tons of way more in depth content being passed over simply because it is hard to find.
I am not 100% educated on the pool reward at this point.. but it is sad to hear that possible rewards for original content writers is being taken by people/bots doing what you illustrated.
The most of these pictures or posts that you see on top, are using bots to upvote their content. Yes I agree that it is a bit difficult at the start, but never loose hope. Keep trying and one day you will be on the top too :)
About the reward pool I can only hope that things change soon as possible :(
Took the words right out my mouth. Couldn't have said it better myself.
I like to read and comment on the publications that I like, sometimes the spam comments exceed 25%, or I find myself with comments that have absolutely nothing to do with the publication, in short, we find everything, how can we eliminate this practice? I don't really know, what I can say is that many times ignorance plays a very important role, when I started on this platform I didn't know anything, with time I have grown in basic knowledge, maybe all those people are like me at the beginning, even so I see many rewards in this kind of commentary and that if it is worrying, the only way to end a bad practice is with a good education! Happy afternoon, I hope that steemit always gets the best way for everyone, excuse my mistakes in English, use translator
What you can do is report them to @steemcleaners at http://steemcleaners.com/reports/new
But new spammers are signing up every day which makes it difficult to control everybody.
The more time you spend on this platform, the more you learn. Dont worry the translator did a good job ;)
I didn't know the way to report to @steemcleaners I noticed it's a pretty simple procedure, I think I have a new job now, thanks for your kind comment
You can join their Discord Channel :
https://discord.gg/Yj4fz8
The self voting of comments is getting much worse on here. I really hate it when people who have a good sized upvote come to my blog and leave a thoughtless comment which they upvote but then dont upvote my post. Its just greedy and rude
Yes exactly! Thats really annoying and pointless :(
I think the most of them are afraid to upvote posts, because they fear loosing their rewards. I am not really sure why it is happening.
there are good people out there who are like you. don't let them discourage you. keep doing what you're doing. followed/upvoted.
Thank you for your support :)
Thank you for spreading awareness on an issue that needs to be addressed on this platform. Followed :)
@conradt - I think anyone who does that could be considered a parasite. Using you to make money, leaving you with nothing in return.
Yeah I agree @mmo-mmo the majority of the time it is just rude and greedy!
@hanen - Unfortunatley, like anywhere else, there are loads of people on Steemit who don't care about the over-all health of the platform or the future of Steemit. They just want to take as much as they can as fast as they can.
As far as spam goes, most of it is deliberate / malicious, but some is just inexperience.
For example, I am still quite new to the platform and still learning. In my first month here I experimented with different types of posts to see what worked and what didn't. I look back on some of those posts now, and some might call them 'spam-like'. But they were not spam, just the result of a newbie trying to figure out Steemit. Besides, I don't have enough Steem or voting power to be able to spam myself into money haha.
Anyway, good post, thanks for the insight.
Everyone of us did the same as you did. Experimenting with different posts and topics to see what people like the most here. To upvote your post is OK, but to upvote comments and not upvote other users is a bit wrong :(
I have learned a lot in the last few weeks, especially about voting and 'dust'. I just keep trying to make better posts and upvote when it actually means something to the receiver.
Thank you for replying!
@henen! I fully agree with you. I think we should not pay attention to them to stop spam comments.
Believe me they wont stop :(
Hey @hanen steemit front and backend platform re changing at the time i'm writing this comment The developer team of steemit inc re working hard to improve lots of functionalities and it is normal to see lots of bugs or things caused by whale since steemit is the first CMS app created on the steem blockchain even with a 2 years of existence. All those problems will be solved in the next few months even the upvoting system will change and we will see lots of new tokens and businesses based on the steem Blockchain in addition to D-tube D-live and Busy.org with the SMT : Smart Media Token :)
lol
What flavor is the STINCy Kool-Aid today?
Grape!
Thats good news. Will be waiting to see these good days :)
I agree with this sentiment 120% I'm getting sick of reading an entire blog post than formulating a nice, information-backed opinionated reply that doesn't even get read when the jerkoff above me writes "GJ nice post!" and has $3.80 in upvotes. I don't do this for the money. I could care less about that; I do it to share & learn new ideas / things from people. But when you have bots/money grubbers who are only in it for the money, than that's just spam for all the great authors / commentators who deserve exposure & curation. SMH
It is really frustrating, but many people are aware of the problem now and I am sure that everything will be fixed soon :(
Agreed/Hopefully.
Meanwhile, @abusereports is flagging bots that only answer when people call them (the exact opposite definition of spam)...
https://steemit.com/abuse/@trincowski/re-abusereports-flag-report-2018-05-08-20180508t172419991z#@abusereports/re-trincowski-re-abusereports-flag-report-2018-05-08-20180508t173936660z
... and flagging users that leave short comments for the sole reason they don't speak English well:
https://steemit.com/abuse/@trincowski/re-abusereports-flag-report-2018-05-08-20180508t172419991z#@palmerjm1/re-trincowski-re-abusereports-flag-report-2018-05-08-20180509t033949948z
Kind of ridiculous, in my opinion.
Because the bots are programmed to do it that way :( It is very difficult to track everything going on here and bots cant do all the work. Everything must be checked out before any action will be taken.Thank you for sharing this!