Unlike most social sites we can't just report abuse to the company to get it dealt with. It's up to the community to do the dirty work. So we have efforts like @steemcleaners, @steemflagrewards and @spaminator. You can support these by voting on their posts and also by delegating to them so they can have more effect by flagging the abuse. Delegation makes it less likely you will suffer retaliation. It's hard for individuals to tackle the big abusers as they can wipe our your rewards easily.
You can still do something by looking for smaller fish. I was just looking through the introduction posts. I voted up a few, but noticed some who were misusing that tag. I left them a comment to say that is not a good idea, but didn't flag these cases.
Then I found this one. He's doing it all wrong by asking for votes whilst adding no real value. Then I see he appears to have his own set of voting bot accounts. They are not doing too much yet, but it's not a good way to behave. I think the introduction bots should be more choosy.
I'm also interested in how he got those accounts. Were they created by Steemit Inc who are supposed to be checking it's a genuine individual. The similar names should have been a giveaway. It wouldn't be hard to flag up if someone was creating numbered accounts like this and they are supposed to provide an email and phone number to reduce the fakes. This does not seem to be effective.
Hardfork 20 is supposed to help matters as it seems a new account will not need any delegation, so it shouldn't have any voting power to start with. This was announced over a year ago and we're still waiting. I hope there will progress on this before Steemfest so we can celebrate it there.
Even if you don't have much SP you can flag some such people with very little risk. I know some people got hit by some tiny new accounts, e.g. 15 SP and 20% VP, but they can't do you any real damage. I'd just ignore them.
The guy who left hundreds of junk comments on this post is worthy of your flags. He's probably doing this to try and hide his activity. I've flagged some of his comments to nothing, but my VP is running low. We have another day or so to deal with the rest that could make him a few undeserved dollars. He's depriving others of a little of what they could get. You'll see he has almost 100 small votes on each post, so he must have control of a 'bot farm'. If we deal with these then they may go away.
As for the big abusers, we need the whales to step in. It's interesting to read this report that almost a fifth of Steem is locked up in exchanges and so is probably playing little part in voting unless the exchanges vote. I know Blocktrades do, but a lot of that goes to @burnpost which is supposed to help control the Steem price, I think.
I have already delegated to several spam-fighting efforts and may support others as I think it's important to make Steemit better. I don't really mind missing out on curation rewards, but then I do like giving good rewards when I can.
I hope this stirs up some discussion.
Updates:
- @personz mentioned @sadkitten who flags those who self vote too much.
- Here's a repeat offending comment self-voter who gives the posts just 1%.
- This one uses bots to get over a dollar on crap comments.
Steem on!
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