I would hope Steemit can at least spot new accounts that just differ by a number. That should be trivial to check. Streamlining sign-up has to be a priority, but it's not easy to deal with abuse.
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I would hope Steemit can at least spot new accounts that just differ by a number. That should be trivial to check. Streamlining sign-up has to be a priority, but it's not easy to deal with abuse.
@patrice hammers this point in Trash Talk, her tuesday evening show on the SteemStar Network.
The proliferation of spam accounts named such as:
abc123
abc1234
abc12345
or
Abcd1
abcd2
etc
Are pretty obvious and have recovery accounts pointing at legitimate signups. If there is a manual process, it's got some very funky guidelines to let 1000 accounts in a row with that kind of naming convention slide on by.
Until that hole is plugged, raising the dust rate hurts venezuelans and other disadvantaged economies, while proliferating these automated / crowd sourced spam sign ups.
Ahh.. well. They figured we were on to them with the sequential numbers. They are mixing it up now. The biggest problem in identifying them is manpower.
Just today I found an account that was added to mack-bot that was a ramodom voter and not part of a group. These have to be manually checked. Even then I make mistakes so I spend a couple hours a day looking at those that respond to my comments or DM me. 99% of the time they are multi-account abusers but there is always human error.
Well, damn.
Oh yes, good old gina-bot. @neander-squirrel. You done good. I love it when a mention results in an insta-reply.
My guess is that the username that a user chooses is not factored in to their identify verification process. I suppose it could be, but it would not be that hard for an attacker to then just randomize their account name choice, and then they would be back at 'square one'.
Fair point on randomization.
So raising dust, only means they make more bots to meet it.
Chasing sequential usernames forces them to obscure them.
Wonder what the magical "manual verification" step is?
There are separate discussions here. Signup abuse != spam. They are related, and there is overlap - but we cannot solve one problem 100% by just addressing the other.
If delegations are removed from abusive signups, then the damage done there is relatively minimal.
You're right. Remove the rewards and 99% stop their activities on an individual level. That would actually make identifying the multi-account abusers easier.
(While pluggin the hole would reduce the automated spam and In turn reducing load on the sign up process overall)