The amount of spam on Steem has always been an issue, and there have been several suggestions to make changes to make Steem less ‘spammy’. There are two types of spam - comment spam, and ‘memo spam’ - yes those annoying memos advertising resteem bots. I came across a couple of interesting articles by @drakos recently about whether we can get rid of spam, and also some of the statistics about spam on the Steem blockchain. These highlighted not only the state of spam on Steem, but also the need to make changes, as spam is chewing up ‘bandwidth’, as all transactions are stored on the blockchain. I thought I would share some of my suggestions

Memo Spam

In my view the memo spam is becoming a huge issue - my wallet has become overflowed with messages advertising various resteem bots. Not only is this clogging the blockchain, but also these services (in general), offer little to no value, and I believe are taking advantage of new, and less educated Steemians.

As @drakos mentioned in their post, having some type of spam folder wouldn't really work - yes it would ‘hide’ the spam, much like a spam folder does in emails, but the spam would still be stored on the blockchain and thus be adding more data and further clogging up the system.

Restricting memos

With this in mind - one idea is to limit the amount of memos users can send per day, based on their reputation level. So for example new Steemians might be only allowed 20 memo posts per day, and as their reputation increases they would be allowed more memos (the idea being that people with higher rep are more trusted Steemians). This would at least stop new people from coming along and just spamming 1000s of memos per day (A Lot of the resteem bots don’t post themselves so their rep can sometimes remain at 25).

However, what about the bots that have been around for a long time and have a higher rep? A suggestion would be to have a maximum number of memos allowed for free each day (say 100), and anything more would start to cost the user on a per memo basis - and it would have to be an increasing value, which would make spamming the system to extreme less profitable.

I am always quite forward about letting people know that the majority of resteem bots (the ones that advertise through memos) are not profitable (yes I have tested lots of them out). By educating people about them at least I am doing my bit to discourage Steemians from using these services, and making them a bit less profitable. However, spam works on numbers! This is why they send out 1000s of memos - its cost effective and they only need a small number of people to subscribe to start making a profit. This is why I think limiting the amount of memos, and charging people for mass spamming will help.

There has been talk and suggestion of Steem inc taking a stand against spammers - one suggestion is to undelegate the SP of known spammers (the 15 SP you are delegated when you open an account). My problem with this is that it goes against the decentralised nature of Steem and puts power back in the hands of Steem to decide what is spam.

What do people think about these idea? I always love having peoples thoughts and opinions!

Comment Spam

In my mind comment spam comes in two types:

• Blatant spam - much like the memos - where people are mass commenting and trying to sell their service in the comment section
• ‘Uneducated spam’ - these are the comments such as ‘nice post,’I like your information’ or ‘follow for follow'

The blatant spam has decreased since I have been on Steemit (about 4 months), and seems to now be fairly well managed (flagging spam, and Steemcleaners). After being on here 4 months I have no problem flagging this type of spam and encourage others to do the same. By taking a strict stance on this we are letting the spammers know this type of activity isn't tolerated on Steem.

The uneducated spam is still a major problem on Steem and I think a big part of it comes down to people not understanding how Steem works, and that it is a ‘social network’. The majority of this type of content largely goes ignored these days - it's not exactly ‘spam’ in the traditional sense, but it does clog the comments section without adding any value to the discussion.

I mentioned this in a recent post but I think that through education we can help to reduce these types of posts. Even just replying to these comments can help - some people are receptive to this and grateful, but others take a stand. I have seen more people trying to educate these people, and have seen mixed results.

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this as I feel it has been a problem for some time and there needs to be some changes!