Free bread, Resteeming services and a mathematical journey
I've been very vocal about my position on this matter. In my opinion the resteeming services are quite useless. They are nothing but memo spamming bots selling the idea of putting flyers on people's windshields as some sort of revolutionary thing. A complete waste of blockchain resources, that I wish more people would recognize as such.
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://www.vevu.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/windshield-note-33__605.jpg)
Memo Spam?
It is exactly that, thousands upon thousands of messages being sent to wallets with 0.001 SDB offering "amazing" promotional services. If you've been here for a few days I'm sure you've already gotten bombarded by the worse offenders like @hottopic, @promotedpost and friends.
I realize that it seems like being bothered by their existence is a bit silly, but I've done the numbers. I'm attempting to come up with a proper way of calculating the cost they represent on the operational health of the blockchain, but that particular calculation eludes me at the moment.
How many memos does one of these spammers send out?
That's the key question, and also how many actual memo spammers operate on the blockchain today. I've listed only two of them, but without making much effort I can think of 5 more that offer me those lifetime opportunities I seem to keen on refusing.
I decided to allow my curiosity to take over for a second and ran a little report on @promotedpost activities for one day. Mind you, this is one day of operations, one day of transfers alone. The number is a lot higher than I expected.
In a 24 hour window the "amazing" service that @promotedpost offers has sent out 751 memos. Let that number sink in for a second, but also take into account that it does not repeat users. How does it pick its would be clients? Does it have a strategy? Is it all random?
I decided to look further into this and noticed that the memos are sent to people that meet certain conditions. It seems to be looking out for users who are:
- Sending SBD's to a Promotion service already
- Accounts using bidbots
- Recent claimed Reward accounts with higher activity
Of course without looking at any code other things I might theorize about how these services work are complete speculation, but I'm inclined to think that they also scan the blockchain for people using their competitors. At least I found a couple of interesting coincidences that seem to suggest this.
Lets crunch some numbers
To make the math a little simpler, lets round up the amount of memos per day that one of these spammy accounts is currently sending out to 800. Some days the number gets quite higher, but lets keep this quick calculation conservative.
Lets also use another conservative number and say we have currently 10 resteeming "services" operating in the same way. They scan, look for users who meet the profile and send out the annoying memos.
- 800 memos per day * 10 Resteem Bots = 8000 memos per day.
- 8000 memos = 0.001 SBD transactions = $8 SBD per day
- $8 SBD per day, $56 SBD per week
- $3000 + SBD's per year of MEMO SPAM
That's a lot of garbage
A whole year of these spammy spam doing what spam does, which ironically is absolutely nothing. Now, I do know there are those users that use the resteem services, they think its a good deal. However, I submit to you its not, its a waste of money and most users with enough SP to give you a boost, to give you a nice upvote for your work, ignore and sometimes even mute the resteem bots all together.
Who is your target audience? I guess that's the question I have for anyone who is even considering using a resteeming service. Most people who are using these bots, don't read, they just promote their stuff and follow the bot as a condition to use the service they offer. Do you see how the logic is completely flawed?
I realize this post is a bit of tough love, specially if you've been using the resteeming services. I do apologize to those who might feel offended, but I'm seriously attempting to curve the demand for these bots. If enough people realize that they are complete BS, they will stop spamming the network with thousands of SBD's every single month and that sounds like a WIN/WIN for everyone. (except for the spammers, but who cares).
So yeah, they can have the free bread... but they need to stop parking here....
![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmW2fijoxrybX3Kg83HCgZZmZwF8SujXWvr3tn8YCUPCsw/meno%20logo.png)
Other posts by yours truly
• the entrance to our farm
• Fishing for None Fishes - Promoting outside of Steem
• Songwriter Shop Talk Steembirds Full Recording
• Good news everyone, Tether is going to moon!
• salt needs to learn how to bark
Hum. Got any stats on who sent money to them? Seems pretty obvious to me that these are useless but who knows. Maybe the feed of promoted bot is really good and I'm missing out? Lol not.....
Man, I'll self flag full 100% if you find a good post in there..
Omg you tricked me into giving one of them my eyeballs!!!! You don't secretly work for them do you???? Funnily enough, I almost saw a good one. Almost.
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Lmao. You know I'm going to start looking now :D
I get their stuff all the time but have never used one and am not a huge bot user and have never used a resteem service. It makes no sense to me. Who actually looks at their feed? Nobody I would think...
that's my point... if i wanted to stare at garbage I can go to a restaurant's dumpster... So my point is that no respectable curator, whale, curie or otherwise is fishing for gold in those swamps.
I think I started getting them when I was close to 50 rep if I am not mistaken. It's best to ignore them. However, they keep coming back and I see different accounts sending 0.001 sbd.
yeah, it could be filtering out by rep too... i would not be surprised!
My wife and I recognised pretty much from the get-go that spending half a steem/sbd or more on these scams is a good way to lose most of the investment.
On the other hand, if you add up all the 0.001 steem and 0.001 sbd we've received in the last 11 months - that's pure profit for us. Or am I missing something?
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I totally agree with you. You're right, it'd be tough to calculate the actual impact that they have on the value overall, but even just cosmetically, it's an eyesore. I can say that if I was just starting out and that's one of the most frequent interactions I was getting on the platform (because they haven't had the time to network and chat with real Steemian folks yet), I'd have a bad taste in my mouth off rip. No good.
Some of them make outrageous claims... case in point...
Huge Liar Whale here...
@meno Well said about promotedpost and hottopic.
Here we also need your guidance for supporting and boosting up our value and steem power of our accounts.
Prices are low, best move is to stay active... best advice anyone can give someone right now.
Don't stop posting!
By the end of the year I'm gonna be rich with all those little spam transfer of 0.001.... I don't even have to post... LOL
You would need 800 accounts to collect enough. Hahahaha
If they are relentless... so I can be... hmmm (does the Math....) no, It's not worth it. LOL
Hahahah, I do receive lots of their 0.001sbd/steem too.
It's annoying, it is not advisable for anyone who is trying to build a brand on steemit to use any of them. Target your audiences and give them what they want, that's the best way to grow.
correct my friend, correct
Thanks friend...
resteem services are garbage.
My friend, you missed the actual point of the free bread.
Birds eat bread. When birds find a source of free bread, lots of them congregate to eat the bread, and when lots of birds congregate, lots of bird poop results.
;)
its eviler than I thought! hahahahah
Seriously though, I think this bears on your argument.
We are being given free bread by the memobots, and the result is shitting up the blockchain. They are also telling us we can't have a social interactive site (can't park here) without it being continually shit on.
If you find someone putting free bread on your windshield, I reckon that should be considered tantamount to shitting on it, and treated as an act of biological warfare. If the solution is to park elsewhere, then the blockchain (our parking spot) is fatally flawed, and we need to find somewhere else to park.
Sending the bread back, or otherwise responding in any way, simply makes the problem of shitting up the blockchain they are causing worse - unless it causes them to quit. Maybe some appropriate flags would work.
To really stretch your analogy, I would point out that all voting and posting by bots are crimes against society, and the perps need to be prevented from shitting up our society. I'll make allowances for automated means of countering spam and plagiarism, but also feel that's dangerous and potentiates eventual problems as democracy inevitably becomes a weapon against minorities, and should be unnecessary in a properly written blockchain/society.
SOC (SMTs, Oracles, and Communities) should make this ideal society possible, and we may need to park there, rather than here on Steemit, after all, if we can't stop them from stuffing our wallets with free bread. Let's hope folks smarter than I whip up some oracles soon that can exclude them with extreme prejudice!
I'm attempting to curve my expectations while at the same time being optimistic enough to participate of the building of them.