On the blackhat forums there is a term called eWhoring. The scam is you pretend to be a girl in a chat room. You talk to guys and ask them to sign up for some dating site using your affiliate link. Most dating sites have free trials (just need valid credit card, and cancel before trial ends). Dating sites pay from $8 (lead/trial) to $250 (sign up beyond the trial). The really good eWhorers continue the conversation on the dating site to get the bigger payout, but most just go for the initial signup and disappear.
Why do I mention eWhoring?
Because we are seeing the Steemit version of it with author rewards. With eWhoring, the scammer steals some other pretty girl's profile images (without permission / not under proper fair use journalism), and use these stolen images to trick the John into believing he is talking to a real. The good eWhorers will slowly drip images telling good stories along the way.
What is the Steemit Version of eWhoring?
The original version is what we see on other social media networks: the "fake profile of pretty girl" to build up followers. You know the formula:
- Create a new profile
- Insert any attractive woman image profile (typically white and blond, but not always). The more photos of everyday life the scammer can show, the more convincing the story.
- Make up a good story.
- People upvote it and scammer makes SBD.
- Repeat.
Introducing the latest Steemit version of eWhoring - the "fan page" scam
This is similar to a fake profile but pretends to be legitimate because "it's just a fan page." Here's a recent one https://steemit.com/beach/@amandacerny/why-skinny-dip-when-you-can-chunky-dunk with the image below.
Above post was titled "Why SKINNY DIP when you can CHUNKY DUNK 😜🍩🍉🍇💦😂👑" and received a $29.96 reward (I admit there has been much worse especially a year ago, but just showing a recent example). This is not Amanda Cerny's real account. She is a Playboy Playmate. If she was posting on Steemit, you'd think she'd make a really big splash!
So what's the big deal?
I see two main problems that affect us all.
1. Deception, pure & simple. The owner of this Steemit account obviously is trying to milk us for upvotes by posting steamy (pardon the pun) photos. Savvy Steemians will know to ignore or downvote such deception, but as Steemit explodes the masses will be fooled. Some of these accounts will declare in the profile that it is a fan page to address the "deception" issue, but that takes us to the big risk that affects us all.
2. Copyright infringement. This is a HUGE area of risk for Steemit. As more people "play in the Sandbox" and try to game for upvotes in any which way they can, Steemit is incurring a large amount of liability. Simple DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) safe-harbor defense might not be sufficient if Steemit knows that copyright violations are occurring and, in effect, enables such violations by way of the "no/few rules Sandbox."
How Does Steemit Address Bad Content Now?
Well, there's the option to flag a post because of:
- Disagreement on rewards
- Fraud of Plagiarism
- Hate speech or internet trolling
- Intentional miscategorized content or spam
And if you come across a post that appears abusive, please post it in the steemitabuse chat room: https://steemit.chat/channel/steemitabuse But that doesn't seem enough, and there's a lot of gray area eWhoring like content like the one above that clearly is copyright infringement but probably won't get reported to abuse.
Final Thoughts on the Steemit Sandbox
Look, I love sandbox games. I've put a lot of time in to MMO's with persistent worlds. If you've ever played Eve Online, you'll recognize many of the same game theory economics that occur here - gambling, virtual storefronts, diplomacy of the masses, trust & impersonation, etc. all have economic benefit if you are successful.
So I love the game theory behind Steemit participation and creativity of the authors. But if Steemit is to become a viable social network, it will have to invest a lot of money on technology and people to deal with all of the content curation risks that other social networks have to do.
I have many friends on vary sides of the anarchist view to life, crypto and the universe. A social network with too many rules feels like the iron hand of Reddit. But the current way to police our community at Steemit, by downvoting, is not enough. There will be even worse scams (eWhoring and its versions are relatively harmless other than milking the community for rewards). Reddit has both volunteer moderators and global staff editors that police the subs. Facebook has the report function and paid staff that review for violations. Google & Facebook both use textual search engines to find offensive content and image & video analyzers to look for copyrighted material.
Steemit has only begun building its social network infrastructure. The good news is that we're all in EARLY on this journey. But the risk is if Steemit doesn't police the sandbox, or give the community better tools to police it, the liability could tank the value of the social network before it has a chance to go to the moon.