Recently there have been a lot of new accounts that have been abusing the introduceyourself-tag and copying content from elsewhere.
To downvote them more efficiently we need better tools to take care of the problem. My suggestions are:
- Users should be able to mark spam accounts so that they will be shown differently. This is important because it makes so much easier to identify spammers when browsing newest posts. If somebody has posted spam earlier, he will probably try to do it later again. This doesn't need to be a blockchain feature, Steemit can save the information, so it should be easy to implement.
- Maybe also give possibility to mark suspicious accounts. Some spammers might try to make first a few posts that look genuine but later start to spam. Maybe show confirmed spammers with red tag and suspicious accounts with yellow? This would be also good way to mark accounts that have been abusive in some other way.
- Show posts that are most downvoted, so that everybody else can see what other people think is spam and downvote it too. We have to make clear that polluting the blockchain is discouraged!
- Implement the feature I suggested in an earlier post: we need an easy way to buy new accounts. If there is a flood of new spam accounts, it might be good idea to suspend giving away free accounts (maybe for a few hours or days). Or if spammers are coming from one particular country, disable free accounts only for them. If spammers have to buy their accounts, they will probably think a little bit more how they are going to use it.
And here is a message for spammers:
Please, don't even try. If you do stupid things like plagiarize content, you are ruining the reputation of your account. Because Steem is build on a blockchain, everything will be saved forever. You can't delete or change your posts and comments fully, you are just changing what Steemit will show. The original will stay on the blockchain. Even if you start to use your account in a proper way, other users will remember what you did and maybe not upvote you ever – or even downvote your good posts.
Steem is intended to be a platform that encourages original high quality content. If you want to make money, make great posts and you will be rewarded. Spamming is not going to work.
PS. Tell your ideas for easy to implement spamcontrol features! In the long run there are lots of stuff that Steemit can do to handle spam, but it would be nice to find quickly at least some ways to relieve the situation.