Fighting Abuse on Steem: the case @creativemary and what should we do better
Hello my dear Steemians,
First of all I would like to thank everyone who read my previous post and all the comments that were left under the post. The communication is important but on other hand we need to identify the lessons from that case and decide how we can prevent such situations in the future.
At my work when we have discussion some cases and at the end there are two important points:
- Lessons learnt
- Actions to take
First I would like to share the rest of the story and then we can come back to this points.
I am glad that we received the first reaction from Naina, @nainaztengra just shortly after the post was created
Despite of that the Fraud account still insist that it was an original user, please pay attention that the user is calling a female user "He"
Even then the user kept insisting that he is Mary:
With a lot of pressure and evidences I am glad that at the end the user accepted that and admitted to be FRAUD
This case we can consider to be closed, but there is something we need to do to make this place better
Many of users on Steemit posting actively on Hive, therefore I would just suggest, not blindly posting there but if you see the users who have the same accounts on both and if they are new on Steemit, just get in touch and ask if they have account on Steemit.
I would recommend people who have their accounts only on one Blockchain, then to create the same account with the same user name on the other one. Doing that you already have your name booked and nobody can create a twin account under your username
The next suggestion is for the Stemeit Team and @steemcurator01:
currently it is no cost to create an account on Steem, that means anyone can create hundreds of accounts, that is great for spammers.
Therefore, I would suggest to introduce the fee for creating an account of 15 Steem like it was in the beginning of Steemit. Doing that the spammer will think first before giving away 15 Steem
- I do not know how easy or difficult it is, but in my opinion, it would be good if such spam accounts could be completely removed or deleted so that they do not exist.
- like it was in the past with old Steem and Steemcleaners, we need such group back and they should have Steem Power delegated from the Steemit Team to be able to keep the Steem clean and if it is necessary to block such abuser and Downvote
Do you have any thoughts? Then let's discuss. I would appreciate if the @steemcurator01 also will actively participate and express the opinion of the Steemit Team.
I admire your patience with such frauds. I am getting a bit fed up with "communicating"....
I'm quite happy that my accounts on Blurt and Hive appeared quasi automatically and I don't even want to know how many other blockchains there are where I should rather register... :-(
It's a shame!
I support your suggestion for a control team. We already called for this more than a year ago, and then brought it up again several times...
@papi.mati is actively promoting a community initiative. The response is poor. I myself don't feel like checking lists all the time. No matter what happens: without the Steemit team, we will never get enough SP together to fight.
I don't really like the suggestion of buying an account. Of course, it deceives the fraudsters into creating multiple accounts. At the same time, the price will also deter new "good" users.
I think another idea is better: a compulsory introduction. It doesn't have to be an identity card - a photo with a current date (better daily newspaper?!) is enough. Just like it was almost a matter of course "in the past".
Vielen Dank für dein Engagement!
LG Christiane
I believe my patience will not last too long. Time to time we also think what the hell we are doing all this and if there is anything that will get changed at the end.
Contrary to you, I think the fee will keep the spammers away and 15 Steem when converted:
15 Steem = 5.966469 US Dollar (USD)
I think this 15 Steem should be maybe then refundable for those users who will pass 3 month test time*. That in its way, will make people to stay and test platform and not like many today just sign in and do not do anything. Once people paid they will try to test and use the time to decide at the end to stay or go.
We usually pay for everything in real life, like Membership fee to clubs, why not to pay for Steeming. At the end it will reward people. Only then people will take it seriously.
Of course everything depends on the Steemit Team, whoever it is or they are.
Ich danke dir für die Teilnahme an der Diskussion,
LG,
Karly
No, not in contrast to me. I also believe that a fee would keep (some) spammers away. However, at the same time I believe in the side effect. And that wouldn't be so great: as papi.mati says, we would eventually stay among ourselves and bleed out more and more. I can't let his other argument (developing countries) stand. The Steem is not the world's donation pot, but it is precisely this kind of thinking that causes - unfortunately, unfortunately - many users from precisely these developing countries to - to put it kindly - play tricks.
And of course I agree with you: we spend so much money on something, the fee for an interesting platform should not be a problem. It's up to us to make the platform interesting.
The idea of a three-month probation period is very good!
Immer gerne. Du kennst mich - auch, wenn es manchmal bisschen viel ist... ;-)
Look who currently is on the Steemit - it's mostly people from less developed countries or countries in an economical crisis, like Venezuela, Pakistan, or Nigeria.
I am afraid that 15 STEEM would not be achievable for most of them. We would wake up on the platform with a few or no new users at all, so it could be very dangerous.
About the plagiarism, I'm starting a new project on the weekend. I invited the admins of the biggest communities to debate and join me, but for now, there is no answer. It's been only a few hours though, so it may change. Or not. I feel that it's one of the biggest issues. It's difficult to do anything for the community if we are just a group of individualists, not much of the community per se.
My SP is barely 17 500, my community has extra 20k, but I believe that if at least 10 communities with their 30-40k would join the project, our 400 000 would be enough to deal with most of the abusers. Obviously, every additional delegation from the SC team or misterdelegator would be highly appreciated and would make our work easier.
Thank you for joining this conversation and you likely wrote your comment while I typed my to @chriddi. Therefore, there is an explanation why I think that entrance fee is important.
When people joining Steem what do you think the main reason for those who are from developing countries and please do not tell me that it is just communication. It is in the first instance reward
If person is going to spend time and efforts to earn real money then the person should be able to pay refundable entrance fee. That will be reimbursed in 3 months if he remains fair and honest.
Sure, but 15 STEEM is approx 7 USD. In Nigeria minimum monthly salary is 73 USD, in Venezuela, it's 4 USD, in Uganda 1,6 USD... Uganda has 30 - 40 active members on Steemit and yet it's more than the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and France altogether.
I do like that you mention it could be refundable after 3 months. That could be the solution that at least partially satisfy everyone - it would make creating the fake accounts more difficult and yet, would help those users who consider 15 STEEM a lot to make the decision to join us.
I understand your motives, and in general, I think that it's a good idea, but I am afraid that it could make a lot of harm too. Even without the entrance, many people think that Steemit is a scam and are not registering here. If they would have to pay "so much", we would have fewer new users. Well-developed countries write on Hive, for developing countries it's challenging to risk 15 STEEM.
Yesterday I was bored a bit so I checked how many active bloggers we have here. I checked 50 random profiles (non-Korean or Chinese) and counted the number of the communities they were active in the last 7 days. The average number of communities was 2.85. I divided all active members from 77 groups included on my "list of active communities from January" by 2.85 and... I got the number 3 214. That's basically all - approximately 3 214 Steemians are blogging now, not much, isn't it? We have over 1 000 power downs. Sure - some only partial, some from inactive users or bid botters but the platform slowly is shrinking. If we will cut the access to some of the new users by introducing the entrance fee, we may wake up on the platform with very little activity. Smaller activity equals smaller visibility and chance to grow, ergo lower STEEM price - at least in my non-professional opinion.
What if we could make registering more difficult in a different way? Does creating the account always require sharing the phone number and email to verify the identity? If there would be no option to create an account without it, we wouldn't have so much fake accounts. I cannot imagine that someone is buying 50 phone numbers and creating 50 emails just to make an account farm.
When we joined Steem in 2017 we had to pay registration fee of 15 Steem and shortly after it was reimburst, the number of active users that time was huge as you remember the Price for Steem was about $7-8 USD
Generally speaking the number of active users is low because:
These made Hive value to go up and it is quite stable remaining above $1 ($1.49 today and Steem $0.39) despite of low of all Cryptos.
If we recall the time early last year when Steem Price was more than $1.50 then the number of active users were higher too.
Even having couple of thousands more users from developing countries who are financially dependent on Steem because they need to buy food and pay costs for living it will not make Steem stronger.
But it is enough to have just few investors who will come and buy couple of hundred thousands of Steem that will shift the price up and bring more people in.
To create emails is easy and it is also free, I am afraid many can create many addresses. To ask for identity that may make people to stay away. Why someone should share his identity card or mobile number. The easiest really a fee
Regarding the SMTs, as far as I know, Hive doesn't have those either. The odds of us ever seeing SMTs are really slim TBH. The tokens that you see on hive are the hive engine tokens which are a side chain on Hive.
I thought that they have. Also I was wondering if it would be possible to create some possibility of uploading Videos like Dtube in the past, otherwise people first go to youtube and then link it and also NFTs which become very popular. Those stuff would be great to integrate if possible.
I have no experience dealing with video formats, unfortunately. Regarding the support for NFTs, it is totally possible but I alone would not be able to bring this out. Or, I'd need a ton of time to build such a possibility. However, I would definitely be trying to bring that over here.
PS: I'll try and put out a community call for devs who might want to work on this once I have explored this field a bit.
Yes, but when you joined steemit in 2017 it was completely different and instead of mentioned Pakistan and Uganda, there were users from the US and Europe. There is no come back to that Steemit, it went away permanently with Hive.
To avoid abuse. In my opinion it's much more effective than the fee, especially that protecting the identity is not that important in the countries that are present on the platform right now (unfortunately, you can see it when you realize how many people don't know what creative commons is and how many of them use copyrighted photos).
I totally agree with that. It's beyond my possibilities to change it though.
True, but then we can push them to invest at least a bit with club5050 and other similar projects. Also, more active users bring investors from developed countries. If we will have a platform with 1000 users, nobody will be interested in investing here. Quality is important but we cannot totally ignore the quantity.
Greetings friend @stef1.
I find very reasonable the proposal to generate the need for the user to invest at least 15 Steem, this can be done immediately after creating the account, ie, the Steemit team should not delegate the usual 15 Steem to users and the RC should start at 0, seeing forced the user to buy 15 Steem to invest them and thus to generate activity within the platform, this would be a filter and at the same time a market resource that could positively impact the Steem ecosystem.
Thank you @adeljose for your opinion, I completely share it the system should be robust to make it serious
This topic often pops up on Steemit. I wrote a similar post. Many girls from Russia have written that they are sitting at home without work and they are just interested in spending their time writing posts in the bru community. I wanted to raise the issue of the "distribution" of the community fund by sc01, sc06, but the small members did not understand me.
Stop. I remember that when I helped my colleague create an account on hive, he bought 15 have. Isn't that the case on Steemit it now?
Yes, in the past we paid 15 Steem in advance and it was like a delegation from Steemit in our Wallet for some time later on i twas then transferred back completely and this is something that needs to be done. The fee should be kept as delegation until it is clear that he user is serious then it could be given back as reimbursement.
I believe in the community account role but every individual also should build up their accounts and get stronger. Otherwise it is just one sided :)
теперь получилось так, что если писать ВНЕ сообщества, то как бы и не поддерживают. Или самые близкие, постоянные состимитяне, которые не смотрят на принадлежность поста к какому-о сообществу.
Если я правильно понял мысль про "внесообщества".
Я с самого начала была против такое закрыго круга сообщества или клуба, даже когда старый Стимет был. На ночего не поделаешь надо плыть по течению
Hi, @papi.mati
I have the same thoughts as you about developing countries. Even many Russians have very cheap SP, because they came to take money, not invest it.
Do you remember when we talked about this?
This could also be an AI (bot)...
subreddit of just bots...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/
Do you mean to create such program? @starlord28, @etainclub, @the-gorilla what do you think about that?
I can help in building a bot like that. However, I have n expertise in AI or plagiarism detection yet. If Someone could point me in the right direction of the logic that such a bot can have, then I can give this a go. @steemchiller, do you know of any logic that I could use for this purpose?
No time for such bots. Need to save the world with more SDS APIs and frontend improvements... I want to add that rewarding people (by case) with votes for finding plagiarism/spam in the end leads to more of the shit. The only way that could work would be through fixed payments that are independently distributed (for example, through the DAO). As 'reactivating' the SPS is on the agenda for the coming months, we should keep this idea in mind.
SDS is great! I have told you this many frequing times already! really excited to see the features that you have planned come out on SDS!!! Especially the one where we build custom APIs on top!
Yup. The DAO has many ways which can help us in this front.
Thank you for your active interaction, really appreciate it. It feels like you are eager to do as much as you would be able to and that is really nice to know.
Случай с аккаунтом Мэри возмутителен! Иногда я жалею, что на платформе нельзя ставить флаг((((
Из за того что теперь все поделенно на коммунити, такие юзеру идут в другую комминиты и дальше посты делают. Их надо сразу блокировать и закрывать аккаунт
Согласен на все 100%!
Так они снова создадут. ну да, если типа 15 steem платно тогда лишний раз подумают.
The case of "creativmary" reminds me to my shortstory about Mr. Artur and Dr. R.Tur any weeks ago...;-)) It was satire, my god...!
What a shame. People like that make us all more distrustful day by day.