Who really is following me ? (and You)
This morning I opened my blog's home page, and ...here it is - my new milestone: 500 followers.
500 ?!
Hmmm, looks great. I decided to make a post, and write a common "thank you " type post to my followers. And possibly - send a small prize, maybe ~10 SBD to my honored 500th place holder. But who really is my #500 place taker?
I opened database page
https://steemdb.com/@onealfa/followers
And , this was where I started to see an interesting, yet surprising and confusing figures
As the figure "500" on my home page was tumbling back-and-forth between 499 and 500 for a while, I decided to look closer, who exactly did that #500.
To my surprise , most of my last 7 followers all were newbies , who joined steemit only ONE week ago, yet with thousands and thousands of followers. So here are screen shots of some of them
Then I checked steemwhales.com, to see if such high numbers of followed persons are common these days. A new surprise.
Two of these followers, while showing 5000+ and 7000+ persons on their home pages, where not at all in the TOP-20 on steemwhales:
I went back to steemdb.com, to see more statistics. More surprise !
The persons followed, while being listed/sorted in chronological order, yet all were also listed alphabetically (!), by the first letter of the nickname. Your check out this yourself:
https://steemdb.com/@kishore1988/following
It looks to me, that most of those record-braking followers just use some bots, harvesting all the steemit users by the database, letter-by letter. All in a roll.
Mots likely, they never even have opened even one of my posts. I was simply been grabbed by a bot, because today was the turn for a letter "o", and my nick name starts with "o".
Here is some statistics, how the closest pretender to my prize was harvesting new victims, in the last three days
So, once this discovered, I have changed my mind regarding #500 prize. I don't care at all of being grabbed by a bot for a simple "follow-4-follow" reasons. I do not believe that this makes any good at all to steemit, and to the steemit community.
Am I wrong?
No F-4-F any more
I know, we all are humans, and all make mistakes. The first few weeks on steemit I was often asking to follow me, or encouraging to do this. No, I was not begging directly, like "pleazzz follow me, and I will follow you back" (F-4-F) . But once I reach close to 500 followed people on my own list, I suddenly have noticed, that this huge list is not so good. My feed page got overloaded with useless posts, and I figured out, that I maybe see (see, not read) only 10-20% of the posts in my feed, and read completely maybe 3% or 5% of them. Maybe even less (because I have no idea how many goes through my feed)
**So what's the point to have so many followers? **
Currently I am considering to go carefully through my whole list of followed persons, and un-follow 200-300 of them.
I can probably handle 200 on my list , and read, curate, upvote a good half of them.
However 500 seems to be quite and overload to me.
Your thoughts?
P.S.
Hundreds and hundreds of "unfolowed" been seen in the lists of my inspected steemdb.com data, and this was another weird thing.
Do these bots "follow" automatically everything they can find, and then, a few days later, make automatic "unfollow"?
Seems simple, "F-4-F" fans may discover they been followed, and naturally, they follow BACK. Job is done !
Now they can be released, unfolowed, just to make the list smaller.
If this is the case, I think it must get more publicity.
And get some open discussions, shall such bots be tolerated, or not.
P.P.S.
