@utopian-io - Analysing 'spam' comments - 'nice post', 'good post', 'follow me'
How many of these comments are made? How many are upvoted and down-voted? And who are the popular authors and voters of such 'nice comments'?
This is an analysis with an aim to find out if there is any benefit or not to making one of the short, spam-like comments mentioned in the title of this post, namely 'nice post', 'good post', and 'follow me'.
Contents
General / Assumptions
Six month counts
Success/Fail (upvote/down-vote) rate of the comments anaylsed
Popular authors / voters
Summary Analysis
Tools used to gather data and compile report
General
In section 1, the previous 6 months data is gathered.
For the remainder of the report, the previous 30 days only have been assessed. This is due to the load generated (and time taken) while executing such queries against SQL Server.
The comment length queried has been limited to 25 characters (chars) to also reduce load, and catch comments such as 'nice post, upvoted', 'follow me i follow you', and exclude longer comments which may include the words 'nice post'.
The vote counts do not include the self-voting of comments to aid in the assessment of if 'another user' is likely to upvote such a comment.
Not included in the analysis is the payouts/sizes of any votes issued.
1. Six month counts
In this section, a presentation of the growth of the analysed comments over the past six months.
Nice Post
As the chart indicates, we have had a substantial rise in comments of less than 25 characters containing 'nice post' over the past 6 months, which for January 2018 are double what they were for August 2016. September and December buck the rising trend which raises an eyebrow, but generally this comment is on the rise.
Good Post
Excluding November 2016, we have seen a rise in the comment 'good post' month on month and for January 2018, the number is almost 4 times the total of August 2016.
Follow Me
Although there are approximately 50% more 'follow me' comments when comparing January 2018 to August 2017, the chart/numbers are perhaps the most varied of the 3 comments analysed across the 6 month dataset.
2 Success/Fail (upvote/down-vote) rate of the comments anaylsed
In the section, a look at the likelihood of receiving a vote or not for the comments analysed.
Nice Post
Of the 11711 comments made totalling 25 characters or less which included the text 'nice post', 24% of these received an upvote - about 1 in 4. This 'success rate' is reduced to just over 1 in 5 when you include the number of downvotes such comments received.
Good Post
Of the 8517 comments made totalling 25 characters or less which included the text 'good post', 52% of these received an upvote - just over half. Only 90 of these comments received a down-vote, just over 1%.
Follow Me
Of the 1976 comments made containing the words 'follow me', over three quarters (81%) of these comments did not receive a vote. This percentage is increased to 83% when you include the 2% likelihood of a downvote when making this comment.
Summary
A comment made of 25 characters or less including the text 'follow me' is seemingly far less likely to receive a an upvote than a comment of equal length containing the words 'good post'.
A particular large percentage of comments containing 'good post' are being upvoted. This seems to be the best of the 3 comments to use when seeking a vote, but as section 3 highlights, their could be other factors not shown here.
3. Popular authors / voters
The final section takes a brief look at the accounts doing the voting on the comments analysed, and the accounts receiving these votes.
Are the votes widely spread, or is there an obvious group of accounts issuing the votes?
Nice post
The table above seems to show that 3 accounts are receiving the majority of the votes for the comment 'nice post'. It's interesting to find that the top 5 entries have been voted exactly 38 times by 5 different accounts.
Follow me
A much wider spread of votes on comments 'follow me', however, one account appears 9 times in the first 20 records.
Good post
Perhaps the most interesting set of data in this section goes to the comment 'good post'. The analyst shall remain impartial to the data displayed and let the reader decide what is happening here!
4. Summary Analysis
Each comment analysed has seen growth over the past 6 months, from 50% ('follow me') to almost 400% ('good post').
The percentage of upvotes for each of the 3 comments is higher than I expected, particularly for the comment 'good post'.
However, the data presented in the 3rd section of the report may well indicate the presence of 'sock puppet' accounts or voting circles, which is likely to be the reason for these higher than expected figures.
Also, the number of down-votes issued for these comments is not as high as expected, and this seems to show a high level of tolerance towards such 'low quality' comments. Perhaps the general community is opting to mute or ignore such comments instead of acting upon them.
To conclude, it is of the analysts opinion that too many votes are being issued to these 'spam-like' comments. However, a large proportion of these votes seem to be coming from and going to a concentrated set of accounts.
5. Tools used to gather this data and compile report
The data is sourced from SteemSQL - A publicly available SQL database with all the blockchain data held within.
The SQL queries to extra to the data have been produced in both SQL Server Personal Edition and LINQPAD 5.
Example code
The charts used to present the data were produced using MS Excel.
This data was compiled on the 9th February 2018 at 11 am (UCT)
I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #blockchainbi. If you have analysis you would like to be carried out on utopian-io/Steem data, please do contact me or any of the #blockchainbi team and we will do our best to help you.
Thanks
Asher @abh12345
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
Good post!
(This should be the best choice according to your analysis -unfortunately the utopian template alone makes me exceed the 25 char limit) .
Amazing work! The results are really interesting, I would not have expected so many upvotes on comments like this. The payout of thoses would play a certain role as well when drawing conclusions. As a 15 SP user you're probably happy about any reaction you get on your post and "reward" that as well.
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Thanks @crokkon!
Perhaps Steemit should introduce a minimum limit of comment text also?
That should do the trick :D
I suspect the votes are heavily skewed by sock-puppet/2nd (3rd/4th/5th..) accounts, and as you know this data is pretty tricky to get a handle on.
Still, the number of down-votes compared to no votes seems low - although I generally just ignore these comments myself and so perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised.
Cheers!
...immediately after posting this, a lot of the people just rushed in and written/commented with A LOT of the text! lol
But I do like your post - being new to Steemit, I am trying to "find my way" into community and indeed, seen a lot of the comments you referd to earlier.
You just "gained" yourself another follower! :)
Cheers,
Adrian
wow, very interesting analysis! Didn't expect that there are such grave differences between "nice post" and "good post". The fact that for "good post!" an upvote is more likely could explain why the prevalence of this type of comment has grown in the last half year by 400%, unbelievable!
Of course, voting circles might play a role here. This would require social network analysis.
CU,
Chris aka smallstepschange
Yes there is a sizable difference, but if you look at the author of such 'good comments', there is clearly something amiss here!
Agreed :)
Would be interesting, how many of such posts are made by automated bots.
THIS is a staggering number/percentage!
The follow me/follow you mentality gets just as old as the nice post, good job... or the combination of the previous two in the good post comment or the wonderful very informative, my friend.
Thank you @goldendawne
I think we've become immune to these types of comments - I barely notice them these days, although will admit to voting the odd one, particularly in my 'early days'.
Thanks for stopping by, I hope you are kicking comment ass this week :D
So you are saying if I included “good post” in my comment that author will be so over joyed they might just give me an upvote? Hehe. I guess I’m not really shocked. People spend a lot of time creating content and any kind of positive feedback tends to be more welcomed then not even when its short form or spam.
This is one list I never want be top of! I do on occasion in a satire kind of way to start off with the for mentioned comments. Always sad getting to a bottom of a blog and just seeing sea of spam. I only do that with people who know I HATE those kinds of comments and I’m just mocking it.
Those December drops are really interesting. Makes me wonder if those kind of accounts changed up tactics. I have noticed a little more “effort” is put into some of these spam comments. They still copy/paste but they try and appear to be as vague as possible while still trying get an upvote out of it.
I have come across a couple of people in past few months where I had to go check their comments just to confirm that it was a copy/paste and they were just targeting a certain tag.
I knew some of them where getting upvote once in a while but even at 24%+ successes rate I can see why some of them are going this route.
I have in the past even attempted a couple of times to interact with a spammer. Few times they wanted to argue they were not spam, or they never even reply back. Some of them centrally seem to be human. I suspect some of them live in a low living cost country where $1-2 a day is the living cost. It's a shame they don't realize there are better ways to make way more then that here and they are just tossing it down the drain.
I really am not shocked there are group like mentally forming around this kind of thing. These kind of people tend to have certain kind of "ethics" in how they wish to behave here. Once in a while I have run into some kind of “collative” that will go around trying recruit people into such nonsense.
Thanks for the great comment, this is more like it!
I think it was December when I started noticing the unrelated, longer spam-like comments, and the copy/pasting of other replies.
I dislike those even more and have flagged what I've noticed, so perhaps normal 'good post' service was resumed the following month!
That is disappointing to learn, I'd be tempted with some flags there!
Totally agree here. Just one 'good post' (ops!) has the potential to earn more than a 1000 crap comments!
I've added you to my feed as I like cats, the idea of time traveling, and excellent comments 😁
There was a $1m delegation out to @spaminator a couple of days ago from central, and another $0.5m added to @steemcleaners. Time for this kind of spam to be running scared!
Great work on the identification of the accounts involved too!
That's some fat delegations!
It seems @mrdelegation means business now he can see that progress is being made to identify the tripe.
The account lists weren't the original goal, but I thought I'd include (without @'s) incase the accounts mentioned by you fancied taking a look :)
Cheers!
I usually try and go through all of my comments and leave a decent reward for people who actually bother to write a few sentences and who obviously have read and have an opinion on what I've posted.
I also try to scale the votes so the better comments (in my opinion) rise to the top and I leave the "good post" "good job" "nice" etc alone. Maybe each time I get one of these spammy replies I should say "nice reply", then go to that person's account and copy and paste "nice reply" on their 10 most recent spam comments. Maybe a nicer way of teaching a lesson than flagging?
I agree these spammy comments shouldn't get votes but somehow they do. I don't really like downvoting people unless they really piss me off so usually I'll just ignore the spam. But that in itself may be me being part of the problem. Perhaps we should all be a bit more proactive in educating new users that this isn't how you earn / interact on steemit. For flagrant abusers who appear to have multiple accounts set up to upvote their own spammy comments I think downvotes are in order.
My favorite of all time is still "pls upvode me". That was left on one of my wife's posts months ago and we still joke about it. There's more of a story to it and it's pretty funny but I'm getting into dissertation territory here with the length of my comment so I'll stop.
Happy friday to you.
haha, do they then reply and upvote their comment? :D
The laying of comments is something I try to do also, although it can get a bit out of hand like today!
I agree that lack of action on blatant spam is perhaps not the best way to act, but also there is merit in ignoring the rubbish and using your vote on content that's worth it too.
of crs sir!
Hello, @abh12345!
Excellent work, and although you did not write @ before accounts, I confess that I looked through some accounts.
Before writing any of my comments, I carefully read the messages. But poor knowledge of English sometimes leads me. I use an interpreter and double-check it several times. But I wrote several sentences without checking, believing that they accurately reflect what I had in mind. And as a result, I made a big mistake, adding instead of Upvoted and resteemed - Upvote and resteem. And then I was surprised why my comments were ignored.
Ahh!
Yes there is a huge difference in what you you are tying to say and what is being said there!
The translator has worked well for the above comment, and I commend you for taking the time and effort to do this in order to engage at a 'higher level'.
Thank you!
Yes, now I do not trust myself. Only through a translator. And after I realized my mistake, I went through all my messages and corrected. However, some comments for adjustments were not available.
Yes there is a 7 day limit.
As least you have put in the time to improve your comments, which should put you in a better place going forward. Good luck!
Thank you
Holy s***! Today seems to be the day of number games. This is the third post in 30 mins I´m reading, that has so many statistics in it, that my head is already spinning. 😀
I hate these "begging comments" as much as everyone, but in respect of my VP, I just can´t downvote all of them - so the only real option is to ignore them and carry on.
haha :D
Yes I have to agree and for the majority I just ignore, but for the type of comment below (flagged), I have taken action due to the nature of the comment and the fact she(he?) is a repeat offender!
Thanks for checking the post out, maybe time to lay down or change 'tags' for some photography? :D
haha Yes, I was thinking of going back to bed, because I already outsmarted myself in trying to solve some "higher math" problems regarding the value of STEEM and SBD. 😂
A great one I've seen in the past is someone taking my entire comment, changing a few of the words, and then upvoting themselves so they appear higher in the comment thread in order to collect a "reward". No idea if any form of fuzzy matching could detect this though.
I'm seeing this more and more too. Those irk me more than 'nice post' actually, but are much harder to programmatically find as spam. These comments imo should be flagged by whoever spots them.
Cheers for your input!
Nice post. Follow me. Just kidding! 😂 Excellent work in analysing these comments! I'm starting to get the hang of figuring out the difference between spam comments, and comments that are made by people with poor English. It can be tough sometimes though. :)
Had to be one! :D
Yes you raise a valid point, sometimes the level of English can make the comment seem like spam. You would hope to see an effort and use of the translator as apposed to the easy to learn 'nice post' approach though. Cheers!