Stop Rewarding the Follow-For-Follow/Great Post Crowd
All of us have experienced the large inflow of new steemians that have arrived lately. The growth of the platform started in February and hit a ramp-up in April, followed by further growth in May and June. These levels of adoption has put steemit.com into the top 3,000 websites, worldwide, for traffic.
With growth, comes new challenges and one of the greatest problems that we are all encountering is the influx of account holders that have no sense of decorum. That's not to say that there haven't been plenty of new accounts that seem to have a grasp of how the platform works and want to succeed by doing things the right way. That said, we need to do ourselves a favor and either reprimand or ignore those that offer nothing to steemit accept clutter and annoyance.
The four main categories that these spamming, useless comment, worthless posting account holders fall into a few categories and certainly, further subcategories:
F4F: Everyone has dealt with this one -> "I follow you, follow me back and upvote my posts. Why you no upvote my posts, I follow you!" -> Annoying clutter in your comment section and the only way to get rid of it is to flag it into obscurity.
The Useless Comment: "What you write is magical, it makes me think great amount on important subject" -> Obviously didn't read your post and just creates further clutter. Fishing for an upvote.
The Double Whammy (Useless comment paired with link to unrelated posts): "You have made great point and make me think much. Check out my post on 'Why Saltines are Better than Ritz Crackers'"
Copy Pasta: Account holders that make 25 posts per day that contains nothing but somebody else's work. Ripping a video off youtube, adding a title and tags and hitting post. Not that some of these videos may contain useful content, but the steemian doing the copying adds nothing to the post. They make zero analysis or even add their two cents. They just vomit all over the platform, all day long.
The only way to stop this bad behavior on steemit is to stop feeding this crowd. I know many of us make a point to not reward these people, but some steemians still blanket upvote any comment on their feed. That small reward only encourages this lot to continue to act in this fashion.
I make a point to reward anybody who lays a decent comment on my post with a 20% upvote, every time. I exclude the comments that meet any of the criteria listed above. If their behavior is truly abhorrent, I will respond directly to them and try to briefly educate them why their approach is flawed and will get them nowhere.
As a whole, let's focus on these derelict accounts, when they show up in our comments sections and ensure that they are rewarded with nothing until they change their behavior. Let's be diligent and make sure that we don't reward the wrong people, who bring zero value to the platform.
Please to help me with new project. Look my new "wombat mating rituals" and tell me good thing. Follow and upsteem my post....
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Images source: https://www.pixabay.com
Difficult to change the actual people behavior...
Good post!
If they get ignored enough, they will either leave or change. imo. Thanks @greensmile.
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by wakeupsheeps from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, and someguy123. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you like what we're doing please upvote this comment so we can continue to build the community account that's supporting all members.
LOL
To make matters worse, @jesta has found 24 bots that reply to or comment on posts....
I have a Simple solution, create small communities and add members as the group sees fit.
A lot like @jonny-clearwater comments above
"We could then all use this hashtag not only when we post about these kinds of things, but also when we find this behavior...using it in comments we leave on shitposters. "
but in reverse, take the positive approach and keep the gate partly open....
(Sorry I don't know how to reference a piece of a post yet, but eventually.... :-)
I don't want bots to force us into small enclaves to defend against their actions. The wanna be AI bot invasion is not good for the platform. Just because a Dev can, doesn't mean they should.
I talked about this in a post recently too. You have to remember, there are videos going around the internet at the moment selling steemit as a 'get rich quick' platform. This is very harmful for Steemit. What we need is engaged users. these spam account will always exist as people join that platform and don't know what to do. Some sort of education initiative is needed
Yeah, it seems that education is the best approach - at least an attempt at education. Something to weed out the get rich quick crowd from those that just don't know any better yet. One thing is sure - just ignoring them doesn't work as far as waking them to that unwanted behavior.
That is so true @sminchow. Ignoring them doesn't work.
Something to the effect, "you must watch these three video's on steemit before you may operate your account" Thanks @paulag.
An 'orientation' progarm
Great post! Don't worry, I actually read it. I think you're on the right track. Rewarding people who actually read your post and leave comments that are related to the content is key.
Glad to see you're on the right track from the beginning @unusualmaverick
Thank you @wakeupsheeps I am not a very good writer, but I'm going to give it a try. I want to start posting on here, just not sure what topics to get into.
Start off with what you know. My best piece of advice is to get out and comment, just like this. You will pick up some followers this way.. I don't care if you are William Shakespeare, if you don't have an audience nobody will read your content.
Go ahead and follow some people, interact with their content and let a following begin to build. If you are going to write, keep it short and simple during your start. No reason to write a manuscript when nobody is reading it.
I'll go ahead and follow you to make sure you have an audience.
It's going to be a tough behavior to combat, especially the more the platform grows.
I think a smart move would be to get a #spam trending.
So for example, if one of your tags for this post were #spam or #shitpost or #justlikeshitcoinbutyourblog 🤓
We could then all use this hashtag not only when we post about these kinds of things, but also when we find this behavior...using it in comments we leave on shitposters. This would allow said tag to trend and would allow us to not only easily find people doing this, but also to reward those who did find it with upvotes.
What do you think?
I think that is a stellar idea. It would correct behavior quickly when #shitpost showed up all over your account.
Maybe something less conspicuous. So the shitposters wouldn't realize what was happening. Something that was more a secret to those using it...like #kittenmittens
🤓
Even better. lol. #puppyleash
Just be careful, any tag you post on other peoples post can be posted back on yours. And if you start with a whale you can get -10 reputation with one click.
One must always be aware of one's actions. You can't always stop bad behavior, but you can curb the activities of new bad behavior.
Whales hardly make up even a fraction of the people being referenced
As I said in another post that tackled the same problem I think this will go away with time (hopefully) but only if (as you mentioned) people stop rewarding them with attention, upvotes, and comments. it's fairly similar to Buzzfeed or any other website that produces "content" if you can call it that just for the sake of it. If people suck it up it will stay here.
Also, how does one flag comments like that? Does it do any good, are there steem admins that one can report those abusers to? I am new to this site so I didn't even know that one can flag people. Anyhow, point is stop rewarding spammy comments and content and the site will resort to a more natural and balanced state again, it's a team effort but worth trying.
I agree @thauerbyi that it should revert to a balanced state, as long as nobody encourages the behavior. You'll note to the far right of your name in the comment is a little flag. That is for downvoting content. Enough downvotes will make a comment or a post start to disappear. Be careful what you do with downvotes, people can and will come after you.
I see and thanks for the explanation!
Seriously I hear ya! I haven't been here very long and I just yesterday for the first time since arriving on Steemit, very politely tried to do just what you suggest... told someone to 'if you can't be bothered reading my post then don't bother putting up a generic response' kinda reply...
By the way if you're doing a post on wombat mating rituals I'm there lol
lol
I'm with you on that policy. Although some say it's bad to treat it like facebook where you upvote comments. I don't care though, I like upvoting good comments.
I don't necessarily want followers, I want followers that will interact with what I write, good or bad. I will always be supportive of those people. I won't upvote someone who comments on my page and then upvotes themselves or just leaves a pile of spam.
I figure steemians could be reading 1,000 other blogs, rather than mine. Why not encourage the behavior you want? I like upvoting good comments too!
I read your whole post. Extremely well written and agree that something should be done about the F4F. Perhaps they need to do away with the introduce yourself section so that the robots stay away as well
I like the introduceyourself, if done well, it can get a noob a nice little pile to start their steemit career. Don't care for bots, altogether.
maybe the bots should not be allowed onto the introduce yourself posts
Maybe the bots need to introduce themselves, so we know what we're up against. Hi, I'm a malicious downvoting bot!
Good for you - we need more people like you