The Problem with Spam: Why I May Not Reply to Your Comment

in #spam7 years ago

With every price increase, there's a traffic increase - and with every traffic increase, there's a spam increase.

The amount of spam always works as a grim reminder that Steemit is not a sincere social media/blogging site like some others.

People spam posts without reading them in hopes for upvotes, followers, etc.

Steemit users have widely accepted this, but I'd like to combat that a bit, and here's why.

I feel that the spam comments actually do more harm to Steemit than most realize; the idea behind Steemit - blog for easy magic internet money - is already shady as it is, and most intelligent people tend to have a skeptical attitude towards something like that. So, let's say a smart person checks Steemit out, what does he or she see?

A lot of idiotic spam comments that look like an intellectually challenged monkey wrote them.

That's an instant turn-off.

And when the smart people turn away, what are we left with? The people who look at spam like that and go "Hey, that's a great idea!".

No, the spam is not the biggest problem with the community and not the worst atrocity that currently goes, but my tolerance for this spam is decreasing by the day. I'd hate for good quality users to look at the site and think that it's a site for a bunch of morons.

This is also why I think that too much emphasis is being put on the amount of people joining when more emphasis should be put on the quality of users joining.

Also, I have a dilemma of my own with the spam.

I really appreciate people engaging and commenting on my posts, especially my story chapters. I genuine comment on a story chapter, for me, is even more valuable than a whale upvote, because those posts are very personal for me, and I like to know if people are enjoying it and whatever the fuck.

But it's hard sometimes to differentiate genuine comments from plain spam. I don't want to reply to spam comments and encourage more of it, but I also don't want to not reply back to genuine comments, which I really do appreciate.

I know a lot of those are just bots, so it's useless for me to ask for them to stop, but if you are a new user, a new human user, and are reading this: spam won't get you anywhere. All of us older users think it's annoying and a waste of life.

Read the posts, leave real comments. Don't be afraid to leave negative comments, either. Disagree with me? Awesome, tell me why. Think my story sucks? Great, tell me why. You don't need to kiss my ass for me to like you.

If Steemit is to succeed as a "social media", the users need to be more like real people. Forget the money, forget the upvotes for a second. Just be a human being and engage and this thing becomes more fun for everyone.

Regardless of the rewards and upvotes.

I also know English is not everybody's first language - it isn't mine, either - and that makes it harder to identify good comments, as well.

I will try to reward good comments in the future, but if I don't reply to your engagement, it may be because I falsely identified it as spam.

One rule of thumb that I have is that I try not to reward comments that were self upvoted, so there's that.

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One thing I noticed is that a lot of people make an article called How new users can earn money, or anyone can earn money.

It is the biggest delusion people are creating.

Steemit is a platform where everyone can pursue their interest and get rewarded for it.

If you become good in your interest, you will never depend on a single platform.

That's the best thing about steemit, it gives people an opportunity to grow easily and fast in their interests.

But the ones, who relate steemit with only money are the biggest spammers and creating more like them every day.

Absolutely true.

Great photography, my dear friend. Follow you longtime.

Great information... thanks for sharing, friends forever. I will upvote...

Good post - but like you said, the spammers aren't reading it!

Don't be afraid to leave negative comments, either. Disagree with me? Awesome, tell me why. Think my story sucks? Great, tell me why. You don't need to kiss my ass for me to like you.

I wish more people would have this view.

I have not problem with it, personally. It's good to exchange views, even argue.

It's a process that is best enjoyed, not frowned upon.

There are way to many sensitive echo chambers here.

Where offending someone because you question their view or logic, it sets off a tirade of abusive replies.

In of itself, it's no big deal... but do it to the wrong people with lots of power - and you can kiss all your rewards on other posts, goodbye....

For some (i.e me) you have to be careful, as i cannot afford to lose rewards because someone has a childish 'hissy fit' when I disagree with them...

(please don't be offended with my comment, please don't down vote me! 😂 😂 )

Its way more fun being me here as I care less about the votes ...I am here to blog not make friends or money I have family and a job for those things and most days I don't even want them lol guess being old helps on caring less about other opinions lmao

Being old and not caring less about others (like me, also), can have it's downsides if you upset the wrong people here.

Living in Thailand nowadays, if I make $10-12 a day from this - my living standard goes up - a lot

So now I only upset a few people...lol

lol the wages world wide are a joke these days .... I live in Canada we have much better wages but the average home heating bill is about 400 a month or better in the winter so at the end of the day no one has a penny left ...let alone the land prices ..got 3 or 4 hundred grand .... lmao ... curious what a single family dwelling goes for around there ... rent is insane here also 2 or 3 grand a month around here for a modest house and that's not in the city double it there ..... the cost of living in Canada exceeds most peoples income by a lot .... around 100,000 homeless on any given night ... but we are only allowed access to less than 1% of the land mass of Canada 90% is held for the crown and large corporations... so 9 million sq km of land that no one can touch...

Our rent including water,electric, and internet (no heating bills here.) and for food , for two...

Comes to around...
$ 500/600 a month (US $) - to live OK, but not luxurious by any means. - hence 10 dollars a day = 300 a month.

It's money that makes a real difference for us, here.

wow ... I will use my friends place as an example as I live on my boat .... rent $2300 a month electric $150 a month cell phone cable tv and internet $200 a month heat averaged over the year about $200 a month car ins ,, $100 a month food $400 a month ... not a cheap place to live ... If you make less than 4 grand a month you don't want to live here...

I don't want to live anywhere with an average temp under 28 degrees - CELSIUS.

I hate the cold.

why do you think I have a boat to retire on c u there lol lived in Canada all my life I also hate the COLD ..... Hmmm maybe I should sell my house here I rent out and cannot afford to live in any more and buy one there lol

Two things not related to your post:

I bought Megaman X on Wii U virtual console because I've wanted to play some Megaman X due to your recent posts.

The second thing:

Pew pew pew pew ~~~~c====3

Facebook banned me for 30 days, so you can't reach me there for a while now. I'm @schattenjaeger on steemit.chat, though.

Oh my, what did you do this time? Well Facebook has been banning people for ages now, so it's no surprise. I got already a bit worried when you haven't been posting any memes for a while now.

Well luckily 30 days without Facebook is like 30 days without Facebook. Necessary as hemorrhoids.

I used a naughty word. I'm such a bad boy.

Hi @schattenjaeger, this is your first post I read and I found it interesting.
In my opinion "my post my rules" would apply perfectly to your post and would be a perfect rule for everyone.
You can not ban bot or spam in advance, but cleaning your posts comments you'd do a service to real reader.
Sometimes users comment with a bunch of emoji or with one or two words only. It is up to you as moderator to decide who you prefer as reader.
Bye

Yeah, I may be applying more flagging to hide spam comments in the future.

👍 (not a spam!) 😁

I do understand what you mean. I made a mistake, I wanted to get attention to my contest, so started following resteembots, so I could resteem my blog. But it is not satisfying at all. In my feed I find no one anymore that I wanted to follow. So now I am unfollowing al the resteembots. And when I reply to any post I will sign with the tag of my contest, in the hope that I get peoples attention. But I do like the vote bots! :-) I just do not know where to find them. Just getting jealous on people with a reputation of 30 that post a picture and get like 70 dollar on it. Sometimes worth it, sometimes I think; You say whatttt??? Now is real jealousy not in my dictionary but I do feel like how for the fuck has she or he done that? I just started following you, en het is me een genoegen je te leren kennen. #thepinkrabbit

"A lot of idiotic spam comments that look like an intellectually challenged monkey wrote them."

You are 100% right with that statement. Some comments lately are reducing my intelligence level just by reading them. I don't know how to fix this, maybe I'll make a shit comment compilation vol2 :)

I guess downvoting them to discourage them is one way. But then there's the risk of downvoting a genuine comment from someone who just isn't that good at writing English, so it's a little inconvenient, in my opinion.

Also, like I said, a lot of them are from bots, so they don't really care.

It's a really annoying problem with Steemit, honestly.

I always try to upvote good comments. I think rewarding really good comments will inspire other readers to improve and put more time into it. I just ignore those "I really liked this post and learned a lot, please follow and upvote" comments.

I agree you. I just don't get why people so little care what the impression they leave. To post the same two words under every post is not understanding how it works on your reputation, on your brand. I think we should ignore every spam comment. No one will want to follow spamming member, to support him. It's time to understand that if we are adult people. And this is a problem not only in Steemit, it is going in all other social sites that reward members for activity.

The easiest way I've been able to tell if someone's comment is genuine is by going to their profile real quick and checking their comment history. Usually if they left a spam comment on your post they just left the same generic comment on 100 other posts right there.

That's what I do as well.

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