A reddit user decided to buy his way to the top of the r/videos subreddit in reddit with a wooping 20k upvotes, demostrating how easy is to buy yourself popularity in reddit and cheap too!
Reddit is not the onlyone, Youtube top trending spot can be bought too, also Facbook viral posts and likes, Twitter retweets and likes. In some instantces at cheap price of 5k likes per 5 dollars or 10k followers for 10 dollars.]
Can we say Fake Social Networks now?
Back in 2014 New York Times did a study on bots and fake accounts on social networks, throwing the light into the dark scenes of people making money by selling bot farm services and how others gain profit for their followers, that were basically bots.
Earlier this year The Atlantic did ''The Internet Is Mostly Bots
More than half of web traffic comes from automated programs—many of them malicious''. A piece on the bots and how prolific they are in the internet:
''Most website visitors aren’t humans, but are instead bots—or, programs built to do automated tasks. They are the worker bees of the internet, and also the henchmen. Some bots help refresh your Facebook feed or figure out how to rank Google search results; other bots impersonate humans and carry out devastating DDoS attacks.''
I think this needs to be adressed in Steemit, to prevent prominent and rich companies take advantage of services like steemvoter.
Also there are people trying to create bot farms. There are people that are buying sim cards in bulk to create thousands of steemit accounts for their bot farms. They are harvesting steempower and using it to cash out money, they are destroying steemit in my opinion filling it up with spam and taking the value out of the website.
I guess time will tell the faith of steemit.
Did you like the post? upvote! and follow! ya filthy bot!