Introduction

Recently we passed the 300.000 accounts at Steemit. A milestone for sure! In last months we may have doubled in size from number of accounts perspective. With the enormous increase of accounts, we also experience an (enormous) increase in spamming and scamming.

A week or two/three ago, I started helping the community to try to fight some of the abuse and using my flag / downvote option in case of obvious scamming. Thus far I only commented to spammers and generally ignore the spammers addressing my own account or channels at Steemit.Chat and Discord; I did not use the flag for spammers, yet.

A Spammer Goes Haywire

Yesterday some new account in our community Hive account@rahuljaichand, decided to flag one of my posts (here) without giving any reason in a comment. I'm of the opinion not providing the reason for this flag was quite inappropriate, since my post was not spam or scam, at least in my opinion.

I was interested to learn a bit more about this account, so I checked his/her blog and comment channels. I discovered this account is in the act of comment spamming, writing those meaningless comments, many of them. I wonder if he/she actually reads the posts and comments to which he/she reacts. Hive account@cheetah Hive account@blacklist-a Hive account@firepower Hive account@steemaccess were already flagging him; I was pleased to see that. Three days ago, Hive account@cheetah posted this message to a post of the account "Warning! This user is on my black list, likely as a known plagiarist, spammer or ID thief. Please be cautious with this post!"

Subsequently I decided to post a comment to my own post to warn the community for this account. I also send this account a message into his/her wallet, since I could not find a recent published post to which I could reply. The message was "Really? You flag without commenting why, and you seem to spam the system with all your copy/paste comments?" Maybe not the most diplomatic message, but in essence I don't see anything wrong with it; I'm Dutch and we are known for being upfront, direct and clear in our statements.

The result of my actions:

• 6x 100% downvotes on my most recent posts
• 4x 100% downvotes on Hive account@qsounds of which I ReSteem posts
• downvote to the comment I created to my own post warning about this account

Hive account@rahuljaichand account was created in August 2017 - very new - and has just above 30 Steem Power and a reputation of 0 by now, so he/she didn't hurt me at all in terms of reputation and rewards. Good!

He/She seems to have a YouTube account (https://www.youtube.com/user/rahuljaichand) with 66 followers. Didn't investigate further, since I'm not interested at all what happens at YouTube. Maybe you are? :)

Why This Post?

I would normally not write this type of posts, but I do today because this account shows on multiple levels bad behaviour IMHO and I also do not understand his/her illogical actions:

• Flagging without giving a reason
• Throw more flags at me after I confronted him/her with his/her actions
• Flagging an innocent account simply because their posts are in my posts channel due to ReSteems

while

• The account is already identified by reputable Steemit services and Steemians as a spammer
• Flags have no results due to low Steem Power and reputation

How I Deal with Spammers and Scammers

In case of spamming and scamming, generally I post a comment to try the accountholder to stop his/her actions and/or ask for the reasons of such behaviour. When I get an response - whether I like the response or not - I generally do not flag.

Thus far, I only flagged the very obvious scammers, for which I do not leave a comment, I mostly joined in with many other Steemians on clear identified scammers. In case I will flag an post or comment that is not very obvious scam, then I for sure will write a comment to explain, something I think everybody needs to do in such cases.

I'm still figuring out if I will start flagging spammers. Somehow I don't like to do that, but accounts like Hive account@rahuljaichand gives fuel to change my behaviour. So far so good though, I didn't even flag in this case. I wrote this post instead. Wondering if I'll get a flag :)

EDIT: Hive account@rahuljaichand is back downvoting, not only this one but also my other (new) posts; Still not realising it'll bring him/her nothing other than a drained vote bucket; The account doesn't even show up in the vote drop-down menu of the post, so tiny is its SP, and the reason I give the update her in the post. Having such great fun!

NJOY

follow me @edje