Investigation of bot trails with huge number of new followers
A lot of people have noticed that they receive an average of 10 new followers almost instantly after creating a new post. So far it is quite unclear what is happening. So I decided to investigate certain aspects of these new bot trails.
What do we know so far?
- a lot of the followers have 15 SP delegation. So it looks like the accounts are created via Steemit. But how can this be as you need an unique phone number?
- some of the accounts are created at the same time.
- most accounts are following 10k+ accounts. I noticed even up to 40k.
- nobody got upvoted by these accounts.
I decided to check 6 of these accounts:
@sate
@greel
@rosegold
@dorna
@hashex
@baax
Yesterday I send them all a comment. No reactions so far.
All these accounts have a few things in common:
- did not wrote a single comment. This is why I think it must be bots.
- 100% self votes + don't use all their VP
- all post YouTube movies. Even looks like that's the only thing they do. Can a bot do this?
- sometimes @mac-bot Downvoted their content.
- don't get any valuable upvotes
What further to investigate? Or what to do?
Although I still don't get it, my conclusion is that this doesn't look good at all!
Interested in the research, so following up.
Wow that sucks!
Yes, you were right. Those 10 followers I got right after my last post!
@fox.sida
@ama.rain
@unike
@lenzy
@siralex
@lari.saa
@sahar.cute
@annazi
@natalex
@alax
This wasn't happening before. How do I stop it? Can I? I'm muting them. Now I'm going to have to go through my followers and mute all the dorks. smh
There is no need to me them. You will never see something from them.
@crypto-econom1st I have been noticing less of these, have you?
Yeah for most people out seems to have stopped. I actually have half a update post prepared, but need like a few minutes to finish that post. Most likely it will take a few more days to do so. As I don't have to much time 😥
Hoe is het met het onderzoek inspector gadget? Het is wel raar inderdaad, ik ga ook een kijken in de Steemify app
Tsja, ik kan er de vinger niet helemaal achter krijgen. Noch achter de omvang noch achter het doel. Het lijkt ook heel nutteloos omdat er vooralsnog geen misbruik lijkt te worden gemaakt.
Ik kijk niet naar volgers, slapers of hoeveel het er zijn ik doe de kleine dingen die ik weet en kijk na 12 maanden of ik blijf. Probeer wel twee x per dag te posten en voingpower op 89-90 te houden.
Maar ik ben te pc onhandig en bots enz zijn te ingewikkeld, ik begin net ik ga het zien.
Ik merk dat ik leuke schrijvende interactie op prijs stel en dat had ik niet verwacht.