Trying to Count the Spam Followers

The expression "quality over quantity" certainly applies to the followers on Steemit. The followers that help us the most in our progress in our Steemit journey are the people who follow us because they are really interested in what we write, and like our posts enough to want to support us with upvotes and/or interact with us via comments. But how many of our followers are really our supporters, and how many are just meaningless numbers?

I came across the following post by @erikaflynn:

Followers - Readers, Friends or Just Numbers (not a milestone post) En/Ru

It explains how users on sites without money rewards tend to follow others because of common interests, while many users on Steemit follow lots of others in hopes of being followed back and getting more upvotes and money (the practice of follow for follow), which doesn't work because it increases the follower count but mostly results in followers not interested in the authors' content.

The post pointed me to a tool called Steem Spectacles (its official Steemit account is @spectacles) which gives us an overview of our followers. I had found this tool a few months ago, but the site wasn't working at the time. It was nice to find a reminder to check it out again.

Steem Spectacles

Image source: screenshot of the Steem Spectacles page showing some of the followers who have engaged with me.

The page showing my followers on Spectacles is below:

http://www.steemspectacles.com/@aiyumi

The main overview page shows:

• What they call "loyal followers." This doesn't necessarily mean that absolutely all of them are our great fans, though. It's just the list of followers who upvoted or commented on our posts at least once (including inactive accounts). At the moment, I have 31. Most of them are real people, but there are also a few community initiative accounts (which are also important supporters) like @qurator (helps promote quality content on Steemit), @steemcenterwiki (upvotes collaborators of the Steem Center wiki), @steembasicincome (an experiment trying to provide a basic income to steemians), @brazilians and @brazine (both support steemians from the Brazilian community).
• The most influential followers, or the ones who have the most SP. In my case, two of the already mentioned community initiatives are at the top of the list.

Clicking on "Followers" shows:

• What they call "dead followers." Or in other words, inactive accounts. Accounts that haven't posted anything in over a month. At the moment, I have 15 such followers (mostly small accounts. I'm not sure whether they are just taking a breather, or whether they'll ever come back).
• "Ghost" followers. Active accounts that haven't interacted or upvoted in our last 100 posts (not sure if comments are also considered posts here. If not, since I have less than 100 non-comment posts, to me this means "followers that never engaged with me"). In my case, most followers are in this category! 108 at the time I began writing this post! I know some of them, and that they're well-known names (or at least in the communities I lurk around). However...

Among these 108 accounts, there are other kinds of followers that I wanted to know about but Steem Spectacles doesn't account for. The bots and spammers, which only increase the follower count but mean nothing.

It didn't take me long into my Steemit journey to notice that many of my followers are just bot accounts and spammers. Those ones that follow me as soon as I make a post, or when I use a popular tag such as "introduceyourself" or "blog." I remember the first time when I used the "blog" tag, my followers count jumped by 10 the very minute when I published the post. When I began writing this post, my followers count said 139. For a while, I have been wondering how many are bots or spammers.

I decided to try to find out, and looked for some kind of blacklist of spammers/abusers. The only publicly available blacklist I found was @themarkymark's @buildawhale blacklist, available on GitHub. But only 8 of the accounts following me are in this blacklist, and I was pretty sure there are many more. With no other choice, I had to do it the hard way... I took the usernames I'm unfamiliar with and visited their profiles one by one.

Unsurprisingly, there are quite a few bots and spammers. Most are obvious, and others not so much (there's a chance they're real users), and I didn't count those since I'm unsure. Below are my criteria and conclusions.

The Bots

The bots by people eager to take our hard-earned SBD. Those bots that spam our wallets with messages asking for SBD in return for resteeming our posts to thousands of followers, and when you go to check, most of their "thousands of followers" tend to be dead/inactive accounts (on the bright side, I got 0.011 SBD just from those wallet messages :P ). For every profile I visited that said things like, "Send X SBD with post link in the memo and we'll promote it by resteeming to X,000 followers," I added +1 to my resteem bots count. Usernames that contain "resteem" may be a hint too.

Total: 19

Low-reputation accounts

Accounts with reputation below 25 (the starting reputation level for everyone), which probably means they were flagged heavily for abusing the system (spam, scams/phishing etc.).

Total: 10

Spammers

Accounts publishing lots of "low-effort content." They tend to publish several posts a day (although some post one per day), where the posts have only a link to a video or an image in the body, with no credit/source and no description at all. They indiscriminately follow thousands of users, probably in hope that someone will follow back and give them some extra upvotes. The ones I've checked for comments (I didn't bother to check them all) have never commented on anyone's post.

Total: 27

Conclusion

There might be a few accounts that I missed, but I believe I got most of them. If we add the numbers...

15 inactive accounts + 19 resteem bots + 10 low-reputation accounts + 27 spammers = 71 (basically half of my follower count!)

If we don't consider the 15 inactive accounts (though there are some bots in there, I know there are real users too) and consider only the bots/abusers/spammers I am sure of, the result would be 56. Still a high number. At least, most of them never upvoted or commented on my posts (probably a good thing, because some of them are malicious and may leave phishing links on comments). Still, I'd prefer not to have the bots/abusers/spammers distorting my followers count. Since it's not possible, at least having an easier way to count them would be nice.

I wish there was a tool to count and show the bots and spammers in our followers list... it could have a blacklist of known bots/abusers/spammers, and for the accounts that didn't match, it could use the criteria I used (look for obvious "send SBD and get your posts resteemed" messages in the profile; less than 25 reputation; posts with only a link to an image or a video in the body plus following thousands of users and having never left a comment, etc.), then tell us, "You have a total of X followers that look like spam accounts," then show the list for us to analyze and make our own conclusions, or even let us report usernames to be added to the blacklist. This would give us a better idea of the number of our actual followers.