Facebook stock crashed when it was shown half their accounts are FAKE...Ahem...Do we want the same fate??
We have certain socialists and other scammers here making hundreds of bogus accounts for all sorts of nefarious reasons, from using them to downvote policial opponents, to using them for bogus self-upvoting. THE WITNESSES and Steemit, Inc. had better get out in front of this crisis HERE before we suffer the same fate. AND...I don't want to hear it's not possible. I can give you a list, RIGHT NOW, with enough evidence to win in a court of law, of hundreds of known (even admitted) duplicate accounts being used for activities that in NO WAY benefit the Steemit community.
(Image courtesy of thedailybanter.com)
The article writer here is no math wizard, as you can quickly see by his misue of "50%" in two different contexts, but his basic point is still valid:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-24/facebook-slides-after-report-claims-50-its-users-are-fake
Here is a key excerpt from the link above:
"Facebook's fraudulent numbers hurt its customers (advertisers) by overstating the effectiveness of Facebook's product, the company said.
> Fake accounts affect Facebook at its core in numerous ways:
Its customers purchase advertising on Facebook based on the fact that it can supposedly target advertisements at more than 2 billion real human beings. To the extent that users aren’t real, companies are throwing their money down the drain.
> Fake accounts click on advertising at random, or “like” pages, to throw off antifraud algorithms. Fake accounts look real if they do not follow a clear pattern. This kind of activity defrauds advertisers, but rewards Facebook with revenue.
> Fake accounts often defraud other users on Facebook, through scams, fake news, extortion, and other forms of deception. Often, they can involve governments
FB shares reversed earlier gains after the report started making the rounds; shares were down 1.2% on the day in recent trade."
(Image courtesy of everybodysucksbutus.com)
Yes, we don't have the same problems from an ad (and ad effectiveness/false claims) liability perspective, but we are still negatively impacted in the market for alternate social platforms to Facebook by having thousands--perhaps as many as tens of thousandths--of fake accounts here on Steemit, as well.
We need to position ourselves as THE best alternative to Facebook, ASAP, so that we can take advantage of the eventual total crash and liquidation of that platform.
Getting rid of all the bots and fake accounts here HAS TO BE PRIORITY NUMBER ONE for anybody with a stake in this platform..even more important than debates over Ned's effectiveness or non-effectiveness and that of his remaining programming crew (and the disposition of their stake.)
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE, WITNESSES AND WHALES.
This is YOUR FUTURE too.
The fact of the matter is how it's presented and how it's perceived. FB is centralized, so people had to rely on their authority when they reported the numbers of users on their platform. The steem blockchain is open and transparent to all, and as such, all but only the most gullible understand that the number of accounts vastly outnumbers the amount of actual users. The only problem is if people try to obfuscate and lie about the number of active steem users to the ignorant (false advertising). We have people like @penguinpablo and @paulag among others that do a great job of showing the true numbers of active users along with many other relevant statistics.
Bottom line is FB is the authority of FB, and the steem community is what represents the steem blockchain. If you see a someone spreading FUD about the number of active steem users, call them out about it and get rewarded. But trying to compare what happens to FB and saying it will happen to steem is comparing apples to oranges, and is FUD in itself.