Two days ago, Utopian announced that they are starting a new anti-abuse initiative, designed to incentivize the fight against spam on the Steem blockchain. The new anti-abuse category on utopian.io will allow spam-fighters to get rewards for their contributions in the fight against abuse and spam.
Utopian-io has added members of both SteemflagRewards and SteemCleaners to their team. They will be managing and moderating the new anti-abuse category. They will actively review submissions and have also contributed to the development of the category guidelines.
1 Month Trial
This initiative will be trailed for one month and the results will be evaluated afterwards by the Utopian-io team. During this trial period, they will be working with 'whitelisted members' only, after the trial is over they might create a procedure to enter that whitelist.
I'm not completely sure if it's at all possible to get on the whitelist before the trial period ends. I would assume they currently already have enough people to work with for this bèta test.
Wide Range of Possible Contributions
Looking at what kind of submissions are accepted in the category, it's clear to me that Utopian-io has opted to support a very diverse subset of abuse-related contributions.
There are a number of topics that are accepted as submissions in this new category. Below are some examples.
- Ideas to fight abuse
- Detailed and insightful analysis regarding spam and abuse
- Abuse fighting tools
- Abuse related project promotion (focus on personal experience and new features, no general promotion posts)
- Introduction of your own anti-abuse projects
Do note that Utopian-io has strict guidelines regarding quality. Do not submit any work without having read the guidelines thoroughly!
My Opinion
I personally think that it's about time that Utopian-io got involved with the spam issues on Steem. Not that Steemcleaners and Steemflagrewards weren't doing a good job, but they were in over their heads. They simply didn't have the manpower to clean everything, not their fault.
Now that we have a proper structure and incentive for fighting abuse, I'm absolutely sure that we can finally make a dent into these spammers bottom line. I know that this is still just a trial, but I would absolutely beg the current whitelisted members to start actively contributing to the anti-abuse category.
This is too important to fail and it's currently our best bet to finally get abusive behavior down!