Abuse Fighting Tools - Targeted Search for Spam with SteemLookup
During my seemingly endless search for spam on the Steem blockchain, I've come across an extremely handy tool for finding such low-quality posts. The website steemlookup.com is a highly customizable Steem search engine, originally made by @curie for discovering exceptional content.
It's a little bit ironic that this tool for finding exceptional content can also be used to find the most unexceptional content.
By adjusting the built-in filters, it's easy to find extremely low-quality content. I generally try to find common characteristics of certain types of spam and then I'll try to use Steemlookup with filters that will display content which matches those characteristics.
Practical Examples
Vote Farms
Vote farms are generally pretty easy to spot. They'll have hundreds of small upvotes right after the post is published and they'll contain some generic spam in the post itself. Usually their rewards do not exceed $0.20 in rewards, especially when we're talking about faucet rings that abuse Steemit's free account creation.
If you want to learn more about how these vote farms operate, I highly recommend reading @slobberchops recent post 'Abuse Series: Voting Farms'.
Given the information we have about these vote farms, it's very easy to turn that into usable filter settings to find those types of posts. Let's see what filters we can add to SteemLookup, you'll find them on the left hand side of the home page.
1. We're leaving this filter at the default value of 1440 minutes, which means that only posts that are less than 1 day old will be displayed. You can also lower this value a lot more, since these vote farms tend to upvote very soon after the spam post has been published.
2. Here I've set the 'Pending Payout' filter to only display posts that have a maximum payout of $0.10. I'm going after small scale vote farms and I want to narrow down the results I'm going to get, so $0.10 is a nice threshold.
3. This is the most important bit, I only want to see posts that have more than 100 votes. Posts that have more than 100 votes, but have a payout of less than $0.10, are very likely to be upvoted by vote farms.
Through this method, I discovered a vote farm that had popped up very recently and had been receiving rewards for a couple of days. After I had flagged the first post I had found through Steemlookup, I went to the @steemflagrewards Discord and posted into the #flags-needed channel.
In the Steemflagrewards Discord, @crokkon then helped me flag some more posts and also added the entire vote farm to: https://github.com/steemit/redeemer-irredeemables/pull/38
Bid Bot Abuse
This type of abuse is a little bit harder to find, but not impossible. We're talking about bid bot abuse, if the rewards of the post is not in line with the quality, due to the artificial increasing of rewards by using voting bots.
Here we can narrow down the results by looking for posts that have a high payout, while having a very low number of words. Now, not every post that matches these criteria will fit into this abuse category, but it will make it easier to spot them. Always investigate every individual post and ask for advice in the @steemflagrewards Discord when you're doubting.
1. For this search, I've changed the 'Created before' parameters to look for posts that are between 6 and 7 days old. Just so we can focus on posts that are close to payout.
2. Since we're looking for low quality posts, I've set this parameter to look for posts that contain a maximum of 100 words. You can also lower this if you want. Not every post that contains less than 100 words will be a spam post, it's very important to keep that in mind. It will just make it more likely that some of the displayed posts will be spam.
3. We also only want to see posts that have mora than $10.00 in rewards, this will help you catch the bigger abusers. Again, these are just the number I personally use, they're not completely fine-tuned or anything, so there might be better values to use.
This method of looking for bid bot abuse still catches a lot of legitimate posts, so it's up to you to manually go through the results and look for signs of actual wrongdoing. SteemLookup doesn't actually detect whether someone is using bid bots, so you'll have to manually check for that yourself.
You can only look for posts that are likely to have been upvoted by bid bots. Keep in mind that these Steemians might not realize that they are doing anything wrong, so giving out a warning might be the best first step.
Always check low quality image posts that have been upvoted by bots for plagiarism, that's also a sure way of getting these users banned from using bid bots in the future. Plagiarism is something that is inexcusable and the people who are plagiarizing content should know full well that they are doing something wrong.
Conclusion
SteemLookup is the perfect tool to query the Steem blockchain for spam, without needing to use SQL. Anyone can use it and you're able to get some very good results, just by using basic logic to set up the different filters.
The examples I've given in this post are just the tip of the iceberg, it's entirely possible to come up with far better filters than I have shown you here. The people over at @steemflagrewards will be eternally grateful if you'd join the fight against abuse on the Steem blockchain.
I've been a member there for a couple of months now, recently upping my game against abusers. This tool has made me far more productive than I would have been, if I'd just been looking for spam through Steemit.com.
Nice post @daan.
Sorry to inform you that to use the utopian and antiabuse tag you have to be on whitelist.
I don't want to discourage you from posting like this. It is a nice post and easy to read, helps the antiabuse community.
I wish you would have asked someone about the Initiative first.
I will give you the antiabuse upvote/resteem and SFR bot too. And upvote with my accounts.
Oh dang, I thought that the trial period had already ended, since the tag was visible on https://join.utopian.io/guidelines/ and there was no mention of a trial period there.
It does sting a little bit, but I should have asked for advice first indeed. Thanks for the effort though!
Yes we even have a channel for antiabuse at Utopian and at sfr. Even after the trail period it might still require the whitelist. A decision has not been made about that yet. But if you did read those guidelines it would have notified you that there was a whitelist.
The reason was because we didn't want people coming out of the woodwork trying to become abuse fighter with no experience or backup. Plus the utopian community has 13 categories and 12 of them are established. We cant take away from those categories more than 16.4% daily upvote for our contributions.
It has come out well and most of the contributions have been very excellent posts.
Many people on the list did not even try to make a post. Less than half actually even tried.
We will see what the process is going forward. Again this would have been a pretty good contribution.
You're right, I must've looked right over that. I mean if I had known, I certainly wouldn't have posted it under the utopian tag.
Hi @daan,
This is another great way to find abusers on the platform. It's a handy tool for sure.
This is such a great post, it saddens me to break the news.
Currently, the Utopian anti-abuse category is on a trial period, and whitelist only. It is indicated on the guidelines and on the Utopian antiabuse announcement.
Most of the current whitelisted authors are veteran daily abuse fighters.
Due to ineligibility, your contribution has not been evaluated.
Need help? Write a ticket on https://support.utopian.io/.
Chat with us on Discord.
I actually use this tool to find exceptional content and I didn't realize that you can use it the other way around. I have also recently realized that I'm getting these strange small votes. Many of them at the same time and their value is barely 0.10 in total. I so much dislike it but I thought I can't do anything against it. Now I see I can report the issue :)
Thank you for sharing!
Doesn't matter, still upvoted this like a boss.
Nice write up! I remember someone talking about this tool quite some time ago, but it was for a different purpose. Thanks for sharing this!
That was probably also me :P
https://steemit.com/steemit/@daan/curie-releases-the-ultimate-curation-tool-steemlookup-com-tips-and-tricks-inside
It could have been. I thought it was at first, then I got thinking that it might have been part of a group I was in when I first started on Steemit. Whoever it was (maybe you) was talking about using the tool to maximize curation rewards. You could set the filter to find posts that were close to the threshold and had a high vote value so if you upvoted them you could get more curation rewards. Back then my account was so small that it really didn't matter though :P
I just favourited this - and resteemed. Very useful information!
I just got into flagging with the rewards crew btw.
Good work!
Posted using Partiko Android
oh wow... thanks for the link... I didn't know about steemlookup! That's an excellent resource!
Hi @daan!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 3.709 which ranks you at #5096 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has improved 21 places in the last three days (old rank 5117).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 270 contributions, your post is ranked at #38.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
@c-squared runs a community witness. Please consider using one of your witness votes on us here
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 19 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 15 SBD worth and should receive 189 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
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TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
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