RE: Huge Influx of Bot Followers Is Making My Blood Boil : Either Fix This Sh*t or Let Us...
I've mentioned this to a couple of witnesses @jbn.
These accounts are dead easy to spot and are often created in groups of ten with consecutive numbers.
The follow thousands of people and post a single image with no text or plagiarised youtube videos.
I got so pissed off with it one day I spent an hour reporting accounts to Steem Cleaners which elicited a message from them on Discord telling me they don't deal with videos and I should stop wasting my time.
I'm approaching 1000 followers now and it's taken all the joy out it. I won't be celebrating when I hit that milestone because I know so many of the more recent ones are bots.
A friend of mine joined 2 months ago and now has over 200 followers. Approximately 15 of those are real people. He has made a post every day and every day gets followed by a load more bots.
It's another reason why I don't understand people celebrating 1 million users. What good are they if they're mostly bots?
I think paulag did a post recently where she showed that human commenting accounted for about 15% of comments and the rest were bots.
Anyway. Bit of a rant but I'm with you. May of them are easy to identify at sign up. And past that it would be easy to block them as a user. Then if they got a certain number of blocks they could be shut down.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and your will to make this place a better place, however i fear that the solution is way out of your reach. Steemcleaners can only go so far.. unless the top 21 witnesses, ned and dan come together to solve this issue at blockchain level, i am afraid its gonna continue to spread like a damned virus.
You are right. Many of these accounts are dead easy to spot. But can somebody allocate this much time trying to identify these maniacs?? Thats the real question.. and the real problem is that they will continue to be in your followers list.
Yep. You're right @jbn in terms of the time it takes to spot these accounts manually but the patterns are so obvious there it ought to be fairly easy to do automatically I would think.
Here's a block I found when I was replying to paulag's post:
address100
address101
address102
address103
address104
address105
address106
address107
address108
address109
Those ought to be child's play to stop even signing up in the first place. But, of course they aren't all named like that and, in the end, if there's no will from the people with the power to stop it to do so, I suppose we're snookered.
I don't understand enough about how it all works but there do seem to have been some apps built to tackle stuff that needed doing and wasn't being done. That one the looks out for people using private keys in their memo fields, for example.
But I suppose all these good apps happen after accounts have been created so they are different.
If the governing authority is not willing to make its platform better then there is hrdly anything we can do.. but you are right. Identifying these culprits is one thing however, rooting them out is another, which is way beyond our control..