Abuse Series: For Profit Promotions

         Welcome back to another debatably exciting entry in the Abuse Series! It has been three months since my last musing on the subject of abuse on the platform. I have been content reading up on other contributions since the Utopian trial period.

         In case you did not know, the Anti-abuse category is open to all Steemians who have contributions to share. Of course, there will be judges to your work, but feel free to offer your two cents in the matter.

The Story

         Weeks ago, I received GINA notifications of a barrage of small flags from a certain Hive account@flagabot. Needless to say, I became confused. Did this entity know something I did not? Or, should I be in some sort of identity crisis? Yes, I am a bot. That has been established.

         I checked out the profile and read the description. Part of me suspected this was an agenda from one of the more prominent stakeholders. Without further proof, I could not draw definitive conclusion to the identity.

         One thing that stood out to me was the link on the profile. Curious, I inspected the link and came to this page:

         The image above is a more recent screen capture. It shows the most active users of promotional services on the chain.

         https://bidbot.xyz/ is a tool that tracks bids and votes sent to and from promotional services. Please do not attempt to open it on mobile devices. It may crash your browser.

         I did, in fact, get in touch with the creator of Hive account@flagabot. They follow Hive account@realcleaner flags and are in no relation to that account. The creator of this tool has wished to stay anonymous for their own reasons. They do hope those involved in anti-abuse would use the tool to assist in their efforts.

Application

         In one such case, the tool pointed to the account Hive account@mojo4you as having multitude of bids to many posts a day. Visiting the account, I noted the content found therein:

         Do not let those number of comments fool you. They are mostly automated responses from promotional services for purchasing votes.

         The style of these bids seemed familiar. They involved less-used bots with no cap on returns. Above all, these were services that do not have active quality assurance channels. Something told me that this account belonged to someone who knew what they were doing.

         Looking into their wallet history via Steem World, I came across these entries:

         This seemed to be another account linked to the group above. It looked like Hive account@mojo4you was doing the exact same thing. Only this time, instead of having an exclusive account for bidding, they use only one for that purpose. It is also noteworthy that Hive account@badcontent marked their older operations in the past. Several bot owners had also blacklisted the accounts for cheesing their way through.

         They used to have a separate bidding account that circumvented blacklisting. Many promotional services blacklisted the posting account, which did not affect the outcome. It was a simple and clever way to game the system.

         Some may ask why does this matter? I would like to remind everyone the scale this was happening. The Steemian in question was able to outdo vote buying services such as Hive account@steemium. That is not normal. Not by a long shot. The person approached vote buying with the intent of being inconspicuous.

         In the end, Hive account@spaminator paid a visit to this person. They attempted to negotiate in the Steem Cleaners Discord. But, I do not think they accepted the suggestion for some changes in their posting style.

         Till this day, the account continues to carry out the same thing they have always been doing. It is their freedom, but that does not preclude them from consequences. Do people ever truly leave? This anecdote tells us that some do not despite flags coming their way.

In Conclusion

         https://bidbot.xyz/ is a useful tool to identify potential bid bot abuse. Many promotional services employ reactive tools such as blacklists. Some include tags and categories they refuse to promote via automation. As far as I know, none of them have a team of curators that actively peruse upvoted content.

         Abuse Series seeks to add my thoughts about the current anti-abuse initiatives. They could be critiques or ideas. Sometimes, they are clarifications and random Utopian contributions.

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