The Spam Problem - Some Statistics
View this post on Hive: The Spam Problem - Some Statistics
6 years ago in #spam by drakos (70)
$350.91
- Past Payouts $350.91, 0.00 TRX
- - Author $274.31, 0.00 TRX
- - Curators $76.60, 0.00 TRX
Can you provide any stats about spam from various bots run by our own witnesses? How much spam they’ve created and which ones have given us the most?
And do you think bandwidth restrictions ought to be much tighter for new users?
I see no reason why a new account or a non-invested user should have access to more than a very minimal amount of our bandwidth supply, which is a limited resource, and especially not enough to be able to spam hundreds of memos, JSON transactions, or posts over the span of a day or less. It seems to me that the current allocation is far too generous.
What do you think about STINC’s new bandwidth “credit” proposal?
Certainly I can provide stats about the bid bots. Good idea to suggest that. They are another huge source of spam. Those are specific cases that take more time to query and compile (it took me two days to write this post!). I'll round them up and probably make a separate post.
The bandwidth is a different matter. I think tighter restrictions could help by making the memo cost higher, instead of the current minimal 0.001 SBD/STEEM. There was an idea about increasing that to 0.01 SBD, which I happily support. I would even prefer 0.1 SBD per memo. Might sound harsh for new comers, but it would reduce the impact of those who abuse this privilege. Besides, new comers should focus on improving their presence on the platform by posting, not sending memos. Right now there's a free lunch for everyone, which is not a healthy thing (people get fat).
I'm not aware of Steemit Inc’s new bandwidth credit proposal.
The system is already set up to be pretty demoralizing to minnows. Want to make this even more an insiders club? It's never a good idea to treat every newcomer as the bad actor they could potentially be, in my opinion.
Sorry. But when SP decides bandwidth allocation, which is not an unlimited resorce, and new users have the ability to spam and grind the network to a halt, it presents a major problem for those who have invested far more than the new arrivals looking for a quick payday.
There are many “freemium” apps that limit the use/gameplay of new or non-purchasing users. They do this, not just as a way to earn revenues, but to limit the consumption of resources by those who could and would otherwise play all day for free. It’s not sustainable.
If new users truly love the concept or the platform and feel like it’s beneficial to them to use more of its resources, then perhaps they ought to make some minimal investments (and that isn’t limited to money) in order to earn more of those benefits. If they just want to be a net drain on resources, then why should I care - as an invested user of this platform - if they feel “demoralized?”
I started on this platform with nothing. I didn’t need to spam to get ahead. I never felt like I needed to “hustle” or do anything out of the ordinary in order to “make money.” I did what bloggers typically do and I had no problems earning far more than I needed to interact practically as much as I’ll ever want.
Bandwidth allocation has nothing to do with being an “insider.” And even if it did, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it. You can always choose to not use this blockchain or its interfaces. But if you do choose to use it because you think you can benefit from it, and you understand the dynamics of bandwidth and its use, then I don’t understand why allocation restrictions are a problem or why there would be opposition to earning/paying minimal amounts of money in order to increase your allotment of network resources.
Exactly, I too started on Steemit like everyone else, with the basic delegation and worked my way up. I agree that serious users should invest in building their account (by blogging, dedicating time and/or funding it) to increase their SP without having to resort to spamming.
That's just absurd to expect honest people to pay the price for bad actors. Bandwidth wasn't a huge issue for me like the person who got me to join, he was on mostly during the day and had bandwidth problems all the time, I am usually on late at night into early morning hours so I hardly had problems. People would just throw their arms up into the air and proclaim the site as a joke. You also would totally being doing away with the concept of being rewarded for participation on a website that draws people in to telling people you may have to invest to participate.
Nobody is paying the price for bad actors. It's about resource allocation. These "bad actors" (spammers) are merely a consequence of the currently poor allocation.
Anyone can "participate" - for free. We're talking about the amount of participation...because of limited resources.
I couldn't even phantom people willing to spend so much time trying to access a site and be denied even more so, then to realize it's not even worth the time you put into writing, you'd have to write for years just to get anywhere on here, that's why most people just give up. To be quite frank the way the system is most people don't want anything to do with following minnows, they are all busy ass kissing people with money, it's the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. If you decide to give a objective opinion on something someone wrote you have their faithful followers jumping down your throat. If someone with money said the sky is yellow, the sun is purple and the oceans are white they'd all agree, it's disgusting to tell you the truth. The most places where you see a objective based discussion where a bunch of butt wipes don't show up is when a bunch of whales get together to have a serious discussion. I am just being honest about a lot of how this platform operates.
Like terrorist attacks in Europe are merely a consequence of poor refugee status allocation? Well.. maybe. So Europe should make it less attractive to go there? Well.. maybe.
If you don't want any new members, that's fair. You can say that. It would also be fair for the incrowd to be able to buy more bandwih with the Steem Dollars that are orders of magnitude easier to accumulate for them. There are other solutions thinkable that are friendlier. But you have to be honest about what you want. Is Steemit full? Or does the community actually want new members?
Technically we (minnows) could fork the repository and start our own blockchain community with rules that actually make sense, rules that incentivize quality over quantity in stead of the other way around like it is here. Set a mimimum price for memos, unless the recipient is following you. Allow people to make a maximum of 2 free blogposts per week unless they pay a doubling amount. Maybe it would get more popular because it actually works. And then we close our bandwidth to refugees from Steemit.
Besides, a lot of the mass poor quality self-promoted and somehow royally rewarded posts are authored and bid-botted by vested members from the incrowd. The memo-spam is done by vested members who have made a bidbot business on the chain. New users don't even have a cent to send with memospam.
Yes, new members are the problem to everything that's wrong with Steemit.
</sarcasm>That last sentence gets you a up vote.
Maybe try reading what I’ve actually written.
And if you want to compare bandwidth allocation to terrorism and refugees, I doubt you’re going to get anyone to listen to your arguments.
You have problems with all of the bullshit that happens around here? Good. So do I. But limiting bandwidth allocation for non-invested users is pretty much unrelated to bid bots, circle-jerks, collusion, the initial distribution, the shitty interfaces, the shit content on trending, the shit “whales” and witnesses that prioritize easy cash outs over long-term growth and viability, the incompetence of STINC, and the complete shit culture we have here.
If your idea of fixing any of that is to make spamming and actual attacks on the network much easier for malicious and non-invested actors to accomplish, then I’m afraid we have little more to discuss.
You are not owed anything for showing up. This is a DPoS blockchain. The ‘S’ is for “stake.” Those with more skin in the game are the ones who have more influence and have de facto network “priority.” If you think you deserve more resources than the ones you’re given for free, then by all means, go get yourself more of that stake in the blockchain. That’s how it works. You noobs would do well to understand that.
I'm using advanced figurative language by taking an adynaton-like hyperbolic analogy which - unless the audience stops following the rhetoric when triggered by keywords - is actually highly comparable and illustrative of similar mixed interests that influence the status quo, which currently - as seen by your suggestion and the fierce defence thereof - is not in line with your personal interests.
Translation: In European countries like Germany, the citizens are wary of refugees because they include "bad actors" and dillute the culture they've become accustomed to. At the same time, the leaders are welcoming to refugees because they know they are needed to eventually sustain (pay) the rapidly aging/retiring (whale) community.
What do you mean for free? According to @TrufflePig I've done 39 SBD worth of combined contributions so far. With <2 SBD earned, it means that I've paid 37 SBD to the system and it's whales. If the rules would be such that I could still see some of this emerge in the future, I would have more than a hint of motivation to stay here, because I prefer low-traffic high-quality posts over the shitpost firehose stream that is incentivized here.
That said, Steemit is a nice experiment and differences aside, I'm sure we both like to see it improve. You seem to know your stuff and are highly motivated. If you think you have what it takes you might want to write down a proposal because @ned is hiring, and you sure have a bigger stake in this project than I.
And now I'll go on a coffee break for some mental bandwidth.
Limiting bandwidth any further is only going to discourage legit new users all the more.
Surely if we tackle it on the UI side, we disincentivise posting to the chain.
I'd like to see a 'minimum transaction required to leave memo' slider bar in our wallets.
I'd crank mine up to 0.5 SBD/0.5 STEEM, as would almost everyone else. The spammers would stop sending even miniscule amounts, as it all adds up, particularly if only a tiny fraction of new users have yet to exercise their slider bar.
I'm not totally across the tech, but barring specific transactions from landing on chain sounds really problematic.
I think that would be really effective.
Want to spam me? Pay me.
That’s exactly what I was thinking
Pay me?
Very good idea. However, memo spammers can resort to spamming in comments instead which costs them nothing. Back to square one.
Spammers prefer memospam because it's private. Once they spam in comments, the community and accounts like @steemcleaners and @spaminator will burn their reputation below zero.
It's easy to downvote them into invisibility that way.
Which is why they don't do it now.
True, plus it hurts their reputation 😀
@Drako i think this is a way more reasonable to all including new and small fish like me.
People can mark them as spammers and they can lose their reputaion
It is one great way I've seen games take care of spammers. Make it so they cant afford to spam 10,000 times a day. Eve online was always funny when you could set your own fee. The scammers never wanted to contact me lol.
Only issue is unless you add in a whitelist if you set the fee to high legit uses now can't afforded to carry out the action required. I'm sure some whales would just love to set it to a $500 for there time.
It would be nice if the issue just solved itself by people being education enough to not send the spammers money so they can keep operating. Make it not worth there time in cost due to losses or just not much income where they could be putting resources necessary to run it other places.
I'm sure they will just move to comment spam but at least then they can be swept up and nuked like the bugs they are in a microwave.
I'd like them to be able to set it at $500 too. I doubt there'd be many willing to pay that. Keep in mind it wouldn't stop the transactions from showing.
You could still send a whale 5 SBD (for a steem monsters card for example), it's just the memo field would be greyed out.
You could perhaps make an exception for people you're following.
"If I follow the sender, no minimum. If I don't, set the minimum at .1 SBD"
I'd love them to get a nice little red message "transactions rejected by receiver their minimum threshold of 500$ not met ;p
Sounds good to me.
Although, accounts sending to Bid-bots might not agree. Perhaps these services could cover the cost ;)
sounds perfect , its a bingo from me !!
this is a very good idea. I am a newbie so couldnt talk in the other comments fearing i might anger a senior member and get punished with a negative vote. lol
If i got a slide bar i would make it a steem per advert in my dm. lol
Don't worry about flags, mate. Remember, we're in beta; the whole point of beta is that we test this stuff out and give feedback. You might accidentally say something silly (Lord knows I have), but as long as you're trying to be constructive and bring your manners, nobody of any weight is going to flag you.
All this of the social networks is no longer a novelty for almost anyone. Moreover, I would say that there are very few people who really do not know what they are and what they do +/- serve ... And if we refer specifically to spam, we find a little more of the same, who to this day has not heard any that again on this issue of "SPAM".
Spam, usually involves contacting other people through content, messages or unexpected or unwanted requests. This word also includes the massive sending of messages, the publication of links or images in the biography (profiles or pages) of other users or the large number of requests for friendship requests to people you do not know.
The lack of professionalism of some brands or companies, damage to e-mail marketing and today is doing the same with social media. Because many years ago in most companies, when talking about online marketing almost automatically and exclusively referred to e-mail marketing (although the term evokes and means much more than just this). It is currently that in many businesses they continue more or less with the same lack of knowledge on the subject. But today, instead of those emails, you think almost exclusively in social media and websites, maybe it is more in the first ... and the mistakes that are made in social networks are also almost the same.
The e-mail marketing is not dead, although many have tried to literally kill using this technique as a simple Spammer. Today, perhaps those same professionals are professionals, or simply students who excel at those who apply the same bad techniques in social media.
🔱 @drakos
It is also important to note that sometimes we fall into that deep SPAM without realizing it.
The most basic, fundamental way to stop spam is to stop it from being profitable. Spammers don't spam for fun (in the vast majority of cases at least), they do it for profit, and when it increases that means it's becoming more profitable.
If effective spam blocking features were implemented at the UI level, then users wouldn't see the spam and then wouldn't do whatever the spam is asking them to do, which would make it not profitable to spam and it would mostly go away.
Well done @drakos! You successfully guessed the match result.
Click on the badge to view your Board of Honor.
Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard!
"It's better to keep spam filtering on the UI side" This is so far the best easy solution that can help without too much problems to solve.
Doesn't solve the underlying bloat.
@drakos No need to solve the underlying bloating. Gmail ... Facebook uses the same system. We just need to kill the bait. and we have to make the difference between good advertising and bad advertising . All advertising should not be considered as a spam. an UI system will be just fine for people, the platform will be more user friendly, because spam will be spam, spamming will never end, and the best way to deal with it is to make it less noticeable for people. a 50 spots is really not a big deal and will not help in the long run.
Ps* My view of UI is based on the design of the website itself. a compartmentalization that separate spam from legit memos. like you send everyone you muted to this section. we just need to play with how the information will be displayed for the users. because the main goal of a spam is to get a reaction from the user.
The best way to eliminate waste is to increase a price. Each transaction should have fee growing with increasing number of transactions. If you had to pay 0.1 SBD instead 0.001 SBD for each transaction, it would too costly for spammers to abuse the system.
Spam in comments should be solved by shareable individual blacklists in UI. Most people would end up using same spam filter derived from witnesses or thrusted people. And since most spam would be filtered, the spammers would stop posting because they would have no interactions. If that didn't work, comments could cost a fee.
Both fees should end in reward pool.
You have recieved a free upvote from minnowpond, Send 0.1 -> 2 SBD with your post url as the memo to recieve an upvote from up to 100 accounts!
And this guy, he gives his 1% upvote, that is worth nothing, just that he can leave his marketing comment.
He spams all our postings for days now and don't stop.
Crazy that under this anti spam posting is a comment from him.
@resteem.bot
I have mixed feelings, but you make a few good points, I will be following the conversation to try to improve my position. My starting place is if we can't handle bloat that is a bad thing for a chain trying to be a "Social Media" site. I'm open to changing my mind.
Sneaky Ninja Attack! You have just been defended with a 34.72% upvote!
I was summoned by @drakos. I have done their bidding and now I will vanish...
woosh
A portion of the proceeds from your bid was used in support of youarehope and tarc.
Abuse Policy
Rules
How to use Sneaky Ninja
How it works
Victim of grumpycat?