New accounts soaring but Steemit use falling, multiple account spam?
Looking at the charts on https://steemle.com/charts.php
My go to chart is new accounts created daily
and on this front things look good, the number of new users are growing.
But, if you look at the daily usage figures, votes, posts, replies and edits are down across the board.
This can mean a few things
New users are not engaging
I am not sure I think this is the case but if it it is let's have a look why that might be the case.
- Unable to gain traction with their early posts so they give up.
Combine this with, earlier users also getting frustrated at lack of progress, and it could explain the falls in participation.
- Unable to power up due to unfamiliarity with cryptocurrencies
I feel to solve this we need to be able to explain the advantages of powering up to new users and add a credit card to steem power functionality into the site.
Multiaccounting
To sign up to Steemit you are required to sign in via social media to prevent people setting up new accounts for the free steem they are prefunded with. But I have seen many posts in which people casually mention multiaccounting more than 2 accounts. Multiple accounts could be used to accumulate free SP or manipulate the n2 system.
Old users leaving
Similar to new users there could be a number of users getting frustrated at not succeeding.
Conclusion
If Steemit is being exploited through multiaccounting I hope, and believe, solutions can be found in what is still a new industry. While if the problem is users leaving, I firmly believe that everyone has valuable information and inputs into... something. If Steemit grows, the selection of topics will increase in their quantity and quality, these users will find their niches, the question is will Steemit continue to grow because on the basises of these graphs, it looks worrisome.
Canvas fingerprint, restrict tor access to "read only", block ALL proxies (there's several services that offer a proxy list that is constantly updated for a very low fee; it'd be cheaper than paying multiaccounters), poor quality content scares "serious" users (I saw several postas "about me" attention wh0ring, those should not qualify as valid posts... that's what twitter is for).
Poor feedbaack, is a HUGE demeaner for content creators. I posted one thing here, to have a sh*tty generic comment 30 seconds after it was posted (800 words). If that's the quality of "readers" I rather save myself the trouble of spending 30 minutes typing so that a bot may get paid for pasting a line from a "gen_phraselist.txt" (or I could code one bot myself; where's the API at this?), without reading or giving me any feedback.
Look at bitlanders.com and see the product a bad quality content in a site brings: BOTS
I don't mind 'crap posts' ala twitter, as who am I to judge content, but I agree bots are a problem
Well, crap posts are very easy to be bot made. A botnet could easily make several of them and abuse the system. There's several of them at github...
https://github.com/eon8ight/shitpost-learner
Coming from a spammer/bot builder background I can tell you without a doubt you'll never be able to block all bots/multi-account creation. There are simply too many simple ways to get passed fingerprints, proxy detection, etc. The community is better off using their voting power to kill obvious bot spam and just accepting the fact that a system like this is BEGGING to be gamed. A platform that potentially pays you to post with no built in method of censoring shit posts? Yes please.
You cannot block "all" but you can block a huge majority. You cannot rely on "social moderation" when a botnet can be formed by hundreds of accounts per human user boicoting them to disencourage the use of the site.
By "huge majority" I mean kiddiescripters.
Markov's chains can be detected, Gillespie's algorithm stats can be predicted and Stochastic calculus parsed out of variables.
I repeat, check out bitlanders.com to see the results of leaving a site become a feeding frenzy pool for sharks (bots).
Of course, if it turns out to become another "bitlanders", then some minor adjustments over the already existent bots would "level the game" for everyone... But forget about the "useful content" part of the description of the site.
Although some of it is due to multiaccounting, I'm guessing that a lot of it is:
Why? Because that recent burst in sign-ups coincided with articles purporting to show how to game the system to get more rewards. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the whales didn't co-operate because no-one likes being played. So, (the bulk of) the folks who tried it out didn't succeed, got frustrated and gave up.
(I could be wrong: that hope-to-frustration fall-off could have been experienced by multi-accounters trying to game the system.)
Whatever the reason, it's just a bump in the road.
let's hope