Steemit can "hide" spam and abuse from being viewed. It cannot stop it from occurring or polluting the blockchain.
No more than Microsoft Hotmail or Outlook 365 can stop spam or abuse. It can only try to hide it from appearing in people's inboxes.
Spam and abuse will be prevalent on the blockchain because there is no way to code human ingenuity and greed from abusing things.
each user can select who they want to block and create their own blacklist. It's that simple
Unfortunately, not that simple. Let's say you have 100,000 users. Each user has 1,000 people on their blacklist. (which is quite small considering the number of spammy new accounts that can exist)
Now that becomes 1 million blacklisted user accounts for 100,000 users. At some point, the lag and resources needed to handle all the blacklists start to become a bottleneck for the 3 second blockchain timing to show new posts.
It's not scalable to create blacklists for each user, miles long.
Major free email providers will allow all incoming junk mail and sort them in the spam folder for you. However, there are many approaches to keep emails free from spam, such as IP block lists, grey listing, firewall rules, that prevent spam from reaching the users, therefore tackling the issue at the source. It's a riskier approach because there's a slim chance for false positives if the sending email server is misconfigured (e.g. lack of SPF, DKIM or DMARC records).
P.S. Indeed, concerning the scalability, that's easily circumvented by setting a limit on the blacklist size (say, max 50), just like voting for 30 witnesses. You can select the most spammy accounts you want to block.
Spammers are hacking legitimate accounts behind SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just so their spam can get through from a legitimate email account with those semi-verified features infront of the domain name.
I'm quite skilled at mail servers and the way they operate, much like yourself, to fully understand SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
In your own words:
many approaches
They are all approaches. None of them are 100% spam-proof. If they were, then the inventor of an 100% anti-spam internet would win a nobel prize.
However, that is not the case. Spam on the internet is more than a disease, it's a worldwide plague that eats bandwidth and traffic everyday and it is neverending.
Who pays for spam, the bandwidth it uses, and the resources it requires to try different "approaches" to block it?
The paying users do. Not the ones abusing the system.
This is a big problem, and having blacklists may mitigate the issue a bit.. but it is no where near solving it.
P.S. Indeed, concerning the scalability, that's easily circumvented by setting a limit on the blacklist size (say, max 50)
50 could be filled in a day, by each user on the system. No where near enough. :(
I'm skilled with mail servers too, I've been running my own for years 🤓
Luckily the majority of spammers are amateurs and never bother to configure and run their own servers; when they do, it's poorly configured. Often they use sendgrid or other big services. Indeed, we can't solve the spam problem at 100%, but if we can minimize it then it's a step forward.
A majority of the let's say 100.000 users will rather agree on who the spammers are. Not all those users will have different spammers on their blacklists.
They might agree roughly on the number of real spammers, and that's what the blockchain has to handle.
In the end it is quite a democratic process.
Eliminate abusive preminers (for those not counting premining itself as abuse) and their perpetuated effects
Get rid of the stranglehold of incompetent (at best) management and replace the dysfunctional steemit interface and infrastructure.
?
Start a different blockchain where only witnesses that have full nodes are rewarded, replace the FB based software with something that is scrollable, and integrate a functional javascript-free blockchain explorer in the interface.
New joiners are granted an equal amount of the currency to start to play with, similar, but not necessarily identical to how it was done here.
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Fighting spam is everyone's job, that annoys me too, and it is incredible that there are people who agree with spam, do not know the damage that cause the platform I think it is best to do educational campaigns to combat spam and report those abuses
I think the 7 day limit on being relevant and rewarded actually encourages a quick and rushed quantity of mediocre articles as opposed to fewer high quality articles. If new votes, even after a year, would also bring new rewards, then in the end, actual good posts, and concequently good authors, would float to the surface.
I modified the text and added this: In other words, each user can select who they want to block and create their own blacklist. So it's a personalized process that can be implemented in steem's blockchain code.
Although I too hate spam, I am not sure blocking users is the way to go. I agree that Steemit was built on full transparency and non-censorship because all postings are forever "available" on the blockchain. But, there is still a great deal of censorship taking place on the visible layer.
Flagging is just one such vehicle. Although it does not completely remove a user or their post from the visible layer and certainly doesn't from the blockchain itself, it does put them in a state, if enough flags are received to make it less obvious they are there to most users. I do consider that censorship.
The biggest type of censorship is censorship via bullying. I see that all the time on steemit. I would say that 90% of the time I agree with what is happening but again, it is censorship.
I am not sure there can be a truly top layer censor-free steemit. I am not sure what that would look like. I do understand that whatever is written is on the blockchain and will be on the record forever but how many people do you know that are going out looking at the individual records for each post ever made. Very few.
I wish there was someone more akin to Basic Attention Token (BAT), where I can setup my settings to allow for spam and other types of advertisements based on a certain reward that I would receive from the publishers of such spam and advertisements. Publishers pay for my attention to their content. I think that is a more effective way to deal with it. Anyway, just my thoughts.
This is one of the reasons why I'm not telling my underage sister to join even though her art and crafts are really incredible. Much better work than my stuff was when I was 18. However her confidence is still a bit fragile and Steemit is very rough for new Steemians. So it's simply not worth the risk. I wonder how many shy artists chose to not join or left, because of abuse or ignorance on Steemit.
Any system that provides you monetary value for content will ALWAYS have spam. Simply dont vote for it as soon as you start voting for it on your comments etc you encourage it to happen more.
We all need to start voting on real quality content and only that. However that wont ever happen. It is just one of those pitfalls with really no solution other then you control what you vote on your posts you have that control.
The problem with spam is not the voting, it's their insidious nature. For example, as soon as you post with popular tags you will get spammed. Look at #photography or #introduceyourself. Even when using bidbots, spammers will target you with memos.
Who would decide who gets rejected? And how do you protect against malicious use of tools that are designed to prevent spam? There seem to be lots of negative issues on steemit arising from its economic model and rules around voting and rewards, but from what I've read it may also be very difficult to find a way to change the rules to get the desired outcomes. And that is assuming that everyone even agrees on those outcomes (which is highly unlikely). I keep of Hayek's view that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Perhaps one approach is take a kind of Nasim Taleb approach to minimizing overall risk by spawning sub-steemits that experiment with different rules. This is happening in some sense already with organically organized groups on steemit, however those groups are limited because they cannot change the fundamental rules.
We should have a reputation system based on how many users have muted that other user. This will require oracles and 1 person = 1 vote, but would in my opinion counter a lot of the spam on the chain.
TBH (to be honest)...
Steemit can "hide" spam and abuse from being viewed. It cannot stop it from occurring or polluting the blockchain.
No more than Microsoft Hotmail or Outlook 365 can stop spam or abuse. It can only try to hide it from appearing in people's inboxes.
Spam and abuse will be prevalent on the blockchain because there is no way to code human ingenuity and greed from abusing things.
Unfortunately, not that simple. Let's say you have 100,000 users. Each user has 1,000 people on their blacklist. (which is quite small considering the number of spammy new accounts that can exist)
Now that becomes 1 million blacklisted user accounts for 100,000 users. At some point, the lag and resources needed to handle all the blacklists start to become a bottleneck for the 3 second blockchain timing to show new posts.
It's not scalable to create blacklists for each user, miles long.
You have the right idea. It's just not feasible.
Major free email providers will allow all incoming junk mail and sort them in the spam folder for you. However, there are many approaches to keep emails free from spam, such as IP block lists, grey listing, firewall rules, that prevent spam from reaching the users, therefore tackling the issue at the source. It's a riskier approach because there's a slim chance for false positives if the sending email server is misconfigured (e.g. lack of SPF, DKIM or DMARC records).
P.S. Indeed, concerning the scalability, that's easily circumvented by setting a limit on the blacklist size (say, max 50), just like voting for 30 witnesses. You can select the most spammy accounts you want to block.
Close, but not quite.
Spammers are hacking legitimate accounts behind SPF, DKIM, and DMARC just so their spam can get through from a legitimate email account with those semi-verified features infront of the domain name.
I'm quite skilled at mail servers and the way they operate, much like yourself, to fully understand SPF, DKIM, and DMARC
In your own words:
They are all approaches. None of them are 100% spam-proof. If they were, then the inventor of an 100% anti-spam internet would win a nobel prize.
However, that is not the case. Spam on the internet is more than a disease, it's a worldwide plague that eats bandwidth and traffic everyday and it is neverending.
Who pays for spam, the bandwidth it uses, and the resources it requires to try different "approaches" to block it?
The paying users do. Not the ones abusing the system.
This is a big problem, and having blacklists may mitigate the issue a bit.. but it is no where near solving it.
50 could be filled in a day, by each user on the system. No where near enough. :(
I'm skilled with mail servers too, I've been running my own for years 🤓
Luckily the majority of spammers are amateurs and never bother to configure and run their own servers; when they do, it's poorly configured. Often they use sendgrid or other big services. Indeed, we can't solve the spam problem at 100%, but if we can minimize it then it's a step forward.
Nice to meet a fellow postmaster. :)
A majority of the let's say 100.000 users will rather agree on who the spammers are. Not all those users will have different spammers on their blacklists.
They might agree roughly on the number of real spammers, and that's what the blockchain has to handle.
In the end it is quite a democratic process.
How to:
?
Start a different blockchain where only witnesses that have full nodes are rewarded, replace the FB based software with something that is scrollable, and integrate a functional javascript-free blockchain explorer in the interface.
New joiners are granted an equal amount of the currency to start to play with, similar, but not necessarily identical to how it was done here.
You got a 100.00% upvote from @voteme courtesy of @stimialiti! For next round, send minimum 0.01 SBD to bid for upvote.
Do you know, you can also earn daily passive income simply by delegating your Steem Power to voteme by clicking following links: 10SP, 25SP, 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
You got a 31.25% upvote from @sleeplesswhale courtesy of @stimialiti!
This comment has received a 55.56 % upvote from @steemdiffuser thanks to: @stimialiti.
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Fighting spam is everyone's job, that annoys me too, and it is incredible that there are people who agree with spam, do not know the damage that cause the platform I think it is best to do educational campaigns to combat spam and report those abuses
I think the 7 day limit on being relevant and rewarded actually encourages a quick and rushed quantity of mediocre articles as opposed to fewer high quality articles. If new votes, even after a year, would also bring new rewards, then in the end, actual good posts, and concequently good authors, would float to the surface.
TLRD
What does it mean? No clue.
I modified the text and added this: In other words, each user can select who they want to block and create their own blacklist. So it's a personalized process that can be implemented in steem's blockchain code.
So you would be able to stop users from calling you out on your bullshit by commenting on your posts?
Why do you have to be mean all the time? We're discussing an problem and a potential solution. Where's the bullshit in that?
If it's trolls with abusive responses then no, I don't want their comments, and I don't want my audience to experience their crap.
In my example replace "YOU" by any accounts and once you're at implementing troll detector on the blockchain let me know how that scales.
Read the other comments, we discussed scaling.
Although I too hate spam, I am not sure blocking users is the way to go. I agree that Steemit was built on full transparency and non-censorship because all postings are forever "available" on the blockchain. But, there is still a great deal of censorship taking place on the visible layer.
Flagging is just one such vehicle. Although it does not completely remove a user or their post from the visible layer and certainly doesn't from the blockchain itself, it does put them in a state, if enough flags are received to make it less obvious they are there to most users. I do consider that censorship.
The biggest type of censorship is censorship via bullying. I see that all the time on steemit. I would say that 90% of the time I agree with what is happening but again, it is censorship.
I am not sure there can be a truly top layer censor-free steemit. I am not sure what that would look like. I do understand that whatever is written is on the blockchain and will be on the record forever but how many people do you know that are going out looking at the individual records for each post ever made. Very few.
I wish there was someone more akin to Basic Attention Token (BAT), where I can setup my settings to allow for spam and other types of advertisements based on a certain reward that I would receive from the publishers of such spam and advertisements. Publishers pay for my attention to their content. I think that is a more effective way to deal with it. Anyway, just my thoughts.
This is one of the reasons why I'm not telling my underage sister to join even though her art and crafts are really incredible. Much better work than my stuff was when I was 18. However her confidence is still a bit fragile and Steemit is very rough for new Steemians. So it's simply not worth the risk. I wonder how many shy artists chose to not join or left, because of abuse or ignorance on Steemit.
Any system that provides you monetary value for content will ALWAYS have spam. Simply dont vote for it as soon as you start voting for it on your comments etc you encourage it to happen more.
We all need to start voting on real quality content and only that. However that wont ever happen. It is just one of those pitfalls with really no solution other then you control what you vote on your posts you have that control.
The problem with spam is not the voting, it's their insidious nature. For example, as soon as you post with popular tags you will get spammed. Look at #photography or #introduceyourself. Even when using bidbots, spammers will target you with memos.
Who would decide who gets rejected? And how do you protect against malicious use of tools that are designed to prevent spam? There seem to be lots of negative issues on steemit arising from its economic model and rules around voting and rewards, but from what I've read it may also be very difficult to find a way to change the rules to get the desired outcomes. And that is assuming that everyone even agrees on those outcomes (which is highly unlikely). I keep of Hayek's view that "the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Perhaps one approach is take a kind of Nasim Taleb approach to minimizing overall risk by spawning sub-steemits that experiment with different rules. This is happening in some sense already with organically organized groups on steemit, however those groups are limited because they cannot change the fundamental rules.
I modified the text to make it clearer: each user can select who they want to block and create their own blacklist.
We should have a reputation system based on how many users have muted that other user. This will require oracles and 1 person = 1 vote, but would in my opinion counter a lot of the spam on the chain.
Good idea.