Bots are taking over - is the end near?
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Is this the end of Steemit? |
Massive number of followers
You must have noticed an increase in the number of people who started to follow you the past few days. When you take a look at the accounts, they seem to be bot managed. The number of people who they follow is 30 or more times more than the number of people who follow them. Another thing they have in common, they all only post vids. Even the category of the vids is the same, National Geographic, Cooking, DIY. Most of them do not have a profile image, or a banner. None of them supplies the source of the vids.Why would people follow them
Probably becasue they are not aware. Some people use a follow me, follow you bot. So the fake accounts get automatically added to the list of following. Another reason may be due to the way followers are managed on Steemit. It is not easy to keep track of who you want to follow, so maybe people for now just add everyone who is willing to follow them. That is what I did until yesterday.
Troublesome feed
Your feed is a jungle when you follow more than a few people. With these fake accounts it is turning into an even denser jungle. It is time to take action, remove the fake accounts from your following list, don't give them more exposure than they deserve.
So now it is fixed
Ehm, no. In my opinion the matter is more serious than that. With a little luck not many people will upvote the posts of these fake accounts, but... maybe we don't have to. Imagine they will start upvoting eachother's posts. Can you see the impact of that?
Impact
I am not sure how this will affect the blockchain in the longrun but I wouldn't be surprised if things cluttered the system so much it will become imposible to work with it.
Solution
Maybe an united downvote attack on those accounts could keep damage small. Not sure. When it comes to endurance, I would put my money on the bots. What do you think?
This is the topic of discussion we had this morning. I thought there were too many bots.
I follow you, maybe you can follow me too because i'm a real person! :)
Sounds like something a bot would say...
Lolol
haha :P I'm not a bot! ihihih but you are funny :P
Hehehe
I have my doubts too
The best action is to follow only the stuff you are truly interested. In my case, I follow only the crypto content creators.
It's a good idea!
Yes, that is a good strategy. This doesn't however stop bots from having their own party. Can you see the issue when thousands of bot-accounts start upvoting eachother's vid posts?
You can keep to the content you love and like but they could soon be forming their own incrowd keeping the blockchain occupied with their fake posts and upvotes.
Yeah, if no action is taken about it, they can ruin this platform.
Yes, I think it will take more than just ignore them, to stop them. Time will tell.
Talking about solution I would say there should somehow be a possibility to shut down an account. Just like that is possible on other social media.
If that's not possible then I guess I have found another disadvantage of this so called decentralized platform.
Yep. What I do see when muting these so called bot-accounts is that people are downvoting them to rep 0. It is like hosing the water out of a boat without fixing the leak, but it is something. Not sure how long people are willing to use their voting power for that and if people can keep up when the number of bot-accounts increases.