The issue with Steemit - Fake Followers
Hi Steemians,
So for the past 2 months, I've noticed something that is very concerning. Every time you post something, almost immediately you earn 10 - 20 followers. This has led to many users having thousands of unresponsive followers, and I'm almost certain they are bots.
What can be done in a decentralised community to combat these bots? Steemit say that they manually check registration of new users, but that clearly is not working. I believe the best way to solve this would be to have a limit of amount of follows, maybe set to around 2000.
Give your thoughts down in the comments.
Source: Wikipedia
The bot accounts are probably created by means other than Steemit's verified account creation process. Anyone can create any number of accounts directly on the blockchain if they pay STEEM for the transaction, as far as I understand it.
What I want to know is what whoever creates these bot accounts is getting out of it. As far as I know, you can't really profit directly just by following people, so why do they bother? I don't think there's a way to resolve the issue without understanding what the incentive is.
Interesting, I'll do some research on this in my spare time.