While flagging some spam the other day, I noticed the user had many accounts posting similar stolen and copypasta content and posting up to 10 times a day or more. I flagged most of it using up a lot of voting power in the process but was then contacted by the spammer.
Apparently, flagging his posts was because I was jealous.
He tried resteeming posts I resteemed to shield his own posts from flags and disguise his profiles.
I've reported all the accounts to @patrice at SteemCleaners and took care of the ones I could do myself.
Trying to stop spam and explain why on Steemit is virtually impossible due to the desire to make money with as little effort as possible and the ease it can be done. It is also very unrewarding, not only do you need to sacrifice your stake to counter their spam, you expose yourself to being flagged back.
A bundle of flags
While trying to flag me back, he accidentally flagged (or purposely) posts he resteemed on his profiles.
Fortunately, they usually have almost no Steem Power but it is still a frustrating and seemingly endless process. The amount of low effort, stolen, plagiarized content on Steemit is overwhelming.
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I delegated some SP to spaminator to help. Not sure if that makes a big difference or not.
It does!
Hello Dear Now What You Think Aout This This Is my Unique Article Just Image From Google And You Flag THis Can u Tell Me How this is spam . https://steemit.com/beauty/@mindsmania/makeup-tips-for-teenagers
now what can i think about u
if u are a realy good person than now u remove flag on my this post and upvote this otherwise i think same u are just...........................
steemit87 And khanfd4 these are not my account i have just these 5 accounts @mindsmania
@farhanrajpoot129
@hotandwet
@pornhub1
@aarecipes
That's fucking hilarious.
There are a lot of copy paste accounts out there, may it be copied from another website or steem user, that should be flagged. But unfortunately like you say it's first costly and most likely causing a personal flag war on top of it.
Minnows are scared of it due to those points, especially whenever it comes to abuse through whales. With great power comes great responsibility and I hope that at least some more whales will take their important role seriously on the steem blockchain.
@themarkymark Good catch! The platform is becoming big and saturated. Difficult to police. Maybe the devs can do something about this. Unfair to those decent people who are trying hard to post.Opportunistic people should not thrive on this platform.
Flagging is just a game of whack-a-mole.
Just my opinion. I think you do a good job here on Steemit @themarkymark
Posting on steem should cost money. At least 10 cents. (yours.org has this system and spam is greatly reduced)
It does. To truly make it anywhere on Steemit requires either an investment of money or an investment in quality content and lots of time. Even if spammers weren't flagged, they still would only individually get a small portion of the reward pool because self voting isn't as profitable as you think. In my opinion, there are much worse problems involving bot-net spammers; something that is much more sophisticated than your generic sit-and-post-10-times-a-day-spammer. Flagging is apparently not the answer for this type of spam. I wonder if flagging is effective at all.
You bring up good points, and ones I've been wondering, too. I've looked to see if someone actually looked into this and posted their results, but so far, I haven't found anything. I need to learn more about how to query the blockchain for more than just account names I already know.
At any rate, if it's annoying clutter but unprofitable for the spammers, then while it makes Steemit look bad and potentially less attractive perhaps, the rewardpool is relatively unabused. If it is taking a significant toll, then there needs to be an efficient way to combat it. Flagging, education, what have you.
Kind of sounds cavalier and all about the money, doesn't it? I really don't intend it that way. I do care about quality content.
I hate personally expending resources (which I don't have so I haven't attempted any flagging yet), or see others who do have resources expending so much, especially if it is either a losing battle or a an unseemly but low profit wasteland.
I think we all need to know that, and then maybe adjust strategies accordingly.
I agree! I was trying to read posts under the tag news the other day. One post I read, thought it well written, was about to upvote and comment when I realized it was just a copy/paste from a real news article. Then there are bots now that generate news posts? WTH? I won’t be looking in that tag again.
Not sure how I feel about that, but it's an interesting idea. I heard others say every transaction should cost money, for example sending memos (to stop memo spam) but that's a core feature of Steem is the lack of transaction fees.
Once it is 10 cents, it will slowly grow like Bitcoin fees have. Once the door is open, it will just become larger and larger.
Keeping the cost of entry free so all can participate vs. requiring some skin in the game. I can see the merits of both.
No fee to enter allows everyone in, spreading Steem and Steemit faster and to all parts of the world. Skin in the game might make people more thoughtful about what they post, but inevitably, as you say, it will go up and eventually make it too cost prohibitive, if not go all the way to the point where only those with lots of money can pay to play.
It's a dilemma, and it's really at the heart of not only the spam/plagiarism situation, but the debate over the 'proper distribution' of rewards. Having free entry makes the reward pool seem like monopoly money to a lot of people—even to those who should know better—and it's hard not to think of it like that when you haven't done something to acquire it.
I wish I had the answers. There's so much I feel I need to know. But at risk of overstating the obvious, this issue is only going to get worse when Velocity arrives.
Yeahhh if we could avoid becoming yet another miner-dominated coin that'd be greattt. Steemit already kind of requires at least an initial start-up cost for blog posts to get any visibility. Posting fees would kill the traction steemit has had in developing markets. I think steemit could be a good chance to help raise them up, we shouldn't try too hard to squish them before they've even gotten a chance to compete on an equal level. I know I for one would have difficulty in communicating in any of their native languages.
A tx fee sounds good to me too, the fees could be added to the reward pool. If you can't afford 10 cents to post your stuff into eternal blockchain, then I am not interested in your content - my 2 cents.
You can use @steemcleaners to report spam/abuse. You have less chances this way to be flagged back :)
I do, and I talk with @patrice often. There is just so much to deal with, when I see something I can handle myself, I just do it.
Earning the honorary jr steemcleaner badge! Wear it with pride young scout! 👍
Thanks for your efforts, I’m still learning about these spam and powerful garbage post problems, but I’m down to help out any way that I can. It sounds like some of these issues could destroy the site if left ignored. I guess I don’t understand why changes haven’t already been made to the system and who actually has the power to implement them.
Nice suggestion. shinhan is another example. Mostly about food of what he had last night. Even charging some SBD for posting cannot be a solution if you look at the example of how it's always the same whales upvoting the same "Single Picture" post, scooping up 25SBD every time.
I don't understand these people. I hope they realize that there is more potential to earn more and grow here if they work on their own content. They also hurt people especially minnows because they flood the feed and so our content gets overlooked because of these spammy posts. Too many of them now ..sigh... So thanks for your efforts @themarkymark in giving them a lesson.
And the spam photo looks delicious! :)
Who even invented Specially Processed American Meat it's original guise was a heinous invention and it's new incantation is equally deprived of moral substance!
Good on you! I don't have enough VP to even begin that fight, but I do report them to steemcleaners. It's the best I can do.
Thanks for taking these assjackets to task.
It is frustrating with having to swim through debris of trash to find a jewel post in the midst. Thank you for cleaning up some of the junk on here. There isn’t much that small fishes like us can do but wade through the spam. No idea why the person thinks the reason being flagged is due to jealousy of being one race or another. Ludicrous. Steemit is about growing the community collectively. Doesn’t matter if you are from the west, east, or small island on the rocks somwhere. If you are plagiarizing and putting up content that is not yours, you shouldn’t be rewarded. Simple as that. A person plagiarizing would get an “F” in school. Why shouldn’t that happen on here?
Could you make a post on how to effectively use and report copy/pasta content to steem cleaners ( I guess you could just link to a post as well), but I think this maybe useful to new and newer people on Steemit.
Sure! I'll do one soon.
true talk boss so many people multiple account just to upvote themself.this is very bad,by acting this way may have a negative effect on the community which even crashed the system.please i advice every practicing this act should stop
I've heard agroed and other witnesses speak about having a separate batch of power devoted to flag, it sounds interesting but it's not perfect and would also lead to further abuse, I'm not sure what thsure solution is, but it's certainly annoying, I recent had one of my posts, copied and reposted by a spammer, it's certainly rapant here.
Thanks brother Help me i make full try not copy write.u are good i am happy for you.
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I miss that show!
Nicely done! Funny thing is throughout reading this whole post you made me think of my favorite locals only breakfast at McDonald’s in Oahu Hawaii spam and eggs and damn it’s really good and an acquired yummy taste. Stinks it’s only available in Hawaii! I upvoted your post!
Almost as bad as my inability to enjoy my beloved Fillet-O'-Shrimp!
Haha
nice
you do good , they deserve this , because posting the copy paste content making the steemit community bad, so do report the accounts, i appreciate u <3
keep doing and sharing <3
@sibtainali
Postingan yang indah.. terimakasih
You always help people do well, my friend
Nice post,good Luck
-Kutluhan-
I Read first para of your post .good work bro @themarkymark
Hopefully it will be an experience for us New Beginner, thanks for the post, Which surely this will be very helpful, best regards
very nice and interesting post ...@themarkymark
please follow and unvote ....@ ghiyats
I lost it at the je lousing from asians who are growing fast in this network part lolll.
It seems odd to me how Ned and Dan didn't think this situation through and why there's no proposed hard fork or change to make things just and more importantly sustainable.
Aaaah that image... I had seen it already from someone claiming that is your Steemit average user. Makes sense.
"The amount of low effort, stolen, plagiarized content on Steemit is overwhelming."
This is very true, and one of the things I noticed is now that I have visibility I started seeing people copy pasting my articles and posting them exactly like they were.
Saw 2 of them already, flagged them, but I can't see what they expect to gain from it... no rewards were coming in for them obviously.
Cheers
This post has received a 0.72 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @themarkymark.
I just done some copy and pasting on one of my music blogs to save some time, I tried to put as much into the music blog without going over the top , I hope you do not see it as spam, still I took time to read your blog, am new to steemit and am not here for the money like some people are or for any validation as I use most of my time for making my music and art and various other things...I thought I would follow your posts and leave you a comment too, I ask for nothing in return, but would be nice for people to know I have arrived on Steemit too..... cheers
It's a thankless job for sure, but one that needs to be done. You say it's overwhelming now, but what will it be like when Steemit has 10x as many users? I'm far too new here to make a difference by myself, but would love to do what I can to help. I'll be looking forward to your post on how to @steamcleaners to report abuse.
And to make it a bit less thankless, here's my thanks.
It is really annoying to click on something that looked promising and find an obvious copy-pasta with zero of original content or even a vague try to add something from yourself. :/
Btw, I loved FireFly... why oh goodness why they canceled that pure gold?! T.T
I've only been on Steemit a little over a week but I see the people you're talking about with these copy and paste posts. I really hope that you're successful in deterring these people because if there is enough of them they may ruin it for everyone eventually.
The situation today reminds me the wild west in 19th century.
No central authority,rush for gold, undiscovered lands...thanks god we don't have poor natives.
The only way to catch criminals was the bounty hunters.
My idea to fight spam is put people in fighting spam.
What we may form is an anti-curation site, anti utopian.io.
With supervisors, moderators , delegators.
People, spam hunters, should report spams with predefined rules : why is it spam, what before evidence of the spammer etc..
Once an accepted definition of spam is made, rest is easy.
These spam reporters after acceptation of moderators according to rules, can be upvoted and earn upvotes on spam.
Then, the spammer should be flagged.
The only difficulty here is to define "what is spam?"
One fine day, I may like the lying of my cat on the heater and I may want to post her picture, with just a word... my cat on heater...
There is no problem in doing this.
But, if I start to spend SBD for such a post, this is not because everybody to see my cat but to earn easy cash on simple post.
So, the target should not be the spam but it should be "upvoted spam".
It is impossible to clean the spam in steemit without paying people for hunting spam.
FD.
Tell me about it :( currently being spammed by a poster. I made a mistake of asking him where he clicked the picture. He is posting on all my pictures now and calling them stolen. One look at his profile and one can see through his bull****