The Weasel Report: Spam Bots

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

The Bots Are Not Your Friends

I have been querying the blockchain today in an effort to identify abuse of the SteemIt platform. I was expecting to find some serious problems, and the blockchain did not disappoint.

Here's the number of messages posted by a few SteemIt accounts between start of day January 7 and end of day January 8:

AuthorPostsTotal Reward Payout
cheetah3301481.443
upme242526.175
photocontests208196.344
appreciator19296.999
pushup16940.786
allnatural15420.901
utopian-io12084.954
iamgun11998.06
drotto11860.292
originalworks10951.227
jerrybanfield804201.693
steem-network7930.022
booster7930.543
rewardpoolrape7741368.858
postpromoter6300.648
boomerang5626.77
upmyvote5260.396
sneaky-ninja4972.701
minnowhelper4880.365
jack.the.ripper477121.597
harj461223.243
levitation4220.148
allaz4140.112
photocontests24030.562
dimimp35591.207
ryox3530.435
manuel203370.34
brianyang0912335165.755
sumsum0073162.458
steemcleaners3051126.559
catfacts3050.343
puncakbukit303246.495
vincentyip300319.463
drumz2980.00
jangkeum2893.347
maneki-neko28285.526
mikej2789.47
blazing27751.722
nnajmull27516.269
michaellamden68270422.861

Are all of these posters evil? No!

The good guys

@cheetah and @steemcleaners are working hard to flag spam and prevent the abuse of the SteemIt platform. @photocontests does exactly what you would expect a bot by that name to do. And @catfacts...? Well, it uh... Uhm... It leaves informative facts in the comments. About cats... Rock on buddy! These bots/posters are providing useful or cool services to the community and deserve whatever rewards are coming their way.

The grey area

Automated voting bots. This includes @pushup, @upme, @booster and a few others. Voting bots are okay but I wouldn't call them good. They do good when they're used for good purposes, but more often than not they're used for reward pool abuse rather than the promotion of actual good content. The platform would work better if none of these bots existed, but they can, and are, sometimes used to promote useful content.

The bad guys

These bots are not contributing to the community. These are the guys who are farming the platform for money, farming followers, and generally contributing nothing useful with their posts.

There's a bunch of them, some some are more obvious than others. I find @rewardpoolrape to be the most honest of the bunch. No mistaking what the bot's doing with that name. Sure enough it has posted hundreds of identical comments all of which read

You're so nice for commenting on this post. For that, I gave you a vote!

For this "useful service" to the community, the rewardpoolrape bot has farmed up an impressive 1368 total rewards (Roughly $5,470 USD at today's prices) over a two day period.

While the abuses of a few of these bots are significant, it is clear that they're not the overwhelming majority of the platform. 48,000 Steem (give or take) is generated per day. Of that 48,000 somewhere around 2,400 (5%) goes to the 50 accounts who post to SteemIt the most frequently.

Given that other individual posters are raking in 4%+ of the reward pool on their own on a daily basis, I'd say the platform has some other problems to address before it starts worrying too much about the handful of bad apples lurking among these 50 accounts.

If you enjoy my posts, don't forget to upvote and

Thanks for reading,

-Matt

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Just to clarify - comments made by @steemcleaners are made by a person who uses a comment template. We copy/paste those comments and adapt them to the situation.

You'll probably find @spaminator making the list soon. Those comments are also copied and pasted from a template to fit the situation.

@catfacts - I hear you have facts. About cats?

EDIT: Catfacts seems to be broken. How will I ever learn about felines?
I miss this service already, and I wasn't even aware that it existed until a few minutes ago.

@CatFacts it looks like you're back online. I'm still awaiting your infinite wisdom!

A cat almost never meows at another cat, mostly just humans. Cats typically will spit, purr, and hiss at other cats.

Thank you @weaselhouse for making a transfer to me for an upvote of 1.60% on this post! Half of your bid goes to @budgets which funds growth projects for Steem like our top 25 posts on Steem! The other half helps holders of Steem power earn about 60% APR on a delegation to me! For help, will you please visit https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ because I check my discord server daily? To learn more about Steem, will you please use http://steem.guide/ because this URL forwards to my most recently updated complete Steem tutorial?

Hey, I just read your post about the Quinlan assoc bitcoin crash and wanted to let you know I upvoted this post as I really liked that one.

Thanks for the vote!

Ugh, the machines.