Spam and Fake Content Accounts on STEEMit
One of the ways I like to find articles to read and upvote is to view the New thread and scan down through the posts to see if a headline or image catches my eye. When I don't see something after a while, I will click on some categories to find New articles. Usually, I can find at least 1 or 2 articles that deserve an upvote. Sometimes, I even find article I disagree with and I still do an upvote after making a comment. I figure, if the article was worth it, even if I disagreed with the author's position, it still deserves an upvote because someone else might enjoy reading the article or provide a comment.
Reading articles and providing feedback is what a social network is all about and since Steem and STEEMit has a goal to make a social network, I think that it is important to create this social network community.
A few weeks ago, while I was browsing the New articles, I got annoyed that I had to scan through articles that were obviously bot created. These articles were consolidation of Tweets or other social media postings. I created an article News SPAM Article : What is the point of these articles and why doesn't a bot hit them?. It really bugged me to see all of these articles.
These and the comment spam bots got me to the point that I started adding the following image to the bottom of each of my articles.
Right click and copy the image URL. Feel free to add it to the end of your articles.
Having no other recourse, other than to create my own super-bot that would down vote/flag these articles, I decided to Mute the author of these articles. Obviously, putting Mute on an author doesn't punish them, it only hides them from my view. I'm sure there is a way to see all the accounts that I have muted and share those with you, but I don't know how to do that now. Maybe I should have been a little more diligent and wrote down the account name before muting them, so I could publish a weekly list of accounts to Mute.
Anyway, beyond those annoying authors (probably was just one person with multiple accounts), I found more annoying authors of posts. I don't know if they are bots or not, but a lot of times they are posting the same "article". In this case, they post either a Top 10 Ways... or some other YouTube video. I've started muting those as well, when I look at their article list an only see the same type of articles.
These accounts are no better than the social news spam bots. They don't attempt to provide any original content and for the most part don't even provide additional text with the link to the videos.
If there was a STEEMit Board for disciplinary action, these accounts would be voted to oblivion, in my opinion.
You don't have to be a good writer and you don't have to provide interesting content to STEEMit, but you should try to provide something that is more than copying a URL and hitting Post.
On some of these accounts that I have muted, they don't even have 1 upvote. That means the bot that was setup didn't even do the automatic Upvote post action. What is the point of these accounts?
Anyway, enough of the rant for today. Maybe I will start compiling a list of accounts to mute, I don't know. Maybe I can find an easy way to check the blockchain for those accounts. I encourage you to mute these spam bot accounts as well, but I'm not sure if that will do any good.
Let the positive energy sing!
More Power to the Minnows!!
