Huge Influx of Bot Followers Is Making My Blood Boil : Either Fix This Sh*t or Let Us...
Has anyone else noticed that whenever you publish a post, right after posting it, there are 10-15 people who would start following you? Like there is a sudden increase in your followers.
This has been happening for the past month and their numbers seem to be on rise with time. I refuse to accept that whenever i make a post, 15 random people just happen to like me at that very instant so much that within 1-2 seconds, they all start following me without so much as saying a word..
So Who Are These People?
Pretty sure that these are bot accounts and this phenomenon has really started to piss me off.
You might wonder that since these all are adding in the total number of my followers so why am i getting mad about this? Isn't it a good thing to have more numbers of followers?
What Followers Have To Do With Anything?
Well, they have to do with everything on steemit.. for they are the ones who make you successful. Without them, you are an author with no reader, a speaker with no audience, a sportsman with no supporter.
Steemit was about people interacting with each other and making this platform better by contributing in each others’ posts. But with these bot followers, it feels like that mostly I have been talking to a gigantic wall of crap 💩.
To be honest, i was really happy with 700 followers whom i had acquired organically than these additional 200 duds, who though, have made my followers count 900+, but are totally useless.
How Does Your Followers Affect You?
Sometime ago, i wrote an extensive guide on types of followers and how do they affect you on steemit.
I would emphasize here that those who have missed this post, might want to read it for their own benefit. This will give you a rather clear picture about your own account and how successful have you been on steemit in terms of gaining faithful followers.
Poor Response of @utopian-io On Subject
I also happened to have made a suggestion on utopian.io regarding this menace 2 months ago when i observed the presence of alot of bot accounts on steemit (and not for the good reasons).
I proposed a solution whereby users should be given authority to remove the people who are following them just as they can choose to remove the people they are following.
But the great utopian moderators decided that it was not worth approving because it didn’t add extensive value that can enhance steemit as platform.
They actually thought that i spent some time to make a “small” contribution just so that i could get a shitty 11$ vote from them out of which they would have collected 6$ back. Surprisingly, their own moderator was minting money from them by posting stupid contributions like adding the option of “collage” on steepshot.. woww.. what an idea. A collage option in photo sharing application... my goodness.. i wonder why nobody thought of that before.. hmmm...
That was my last contribution on utopian and probably it will remain that way. I dont have any grudges against utopian. Its @elear’s platform. He makes the rules. As long as it was benefiting community through fair suggestions, it was fine. I also played my part with over 10+ contributions. But I am done with it as long as suitable moderators are assigned to hear valuable suggestions.
So Now Where To Go?
Our problem of these bot followers still remain. So where to go? Should we go to @ned? Or @dan? Or Steem witnesses? I think more appropriate questions will be that do they know? Do they care? Do they KNOW???
So again, i will reiterate, stop this mess.. if bots have to take so much of the space on this platform then you should rename this platform to steembot.com or botit.com.
As a user, i want complete and total control over my profile. I like to be able to know how well am i doing on this platform as far as interacting with people is concerned. I like to be able to correct my course of action if i am not bringing in any new followers. And all of this will not be possible when i cannot even tell that my newest follower is a bot or a human.
FIX THIS OR AT LEAST GIVE US THE POWER TO DO THAT.
Conclusion
I cannot be crazy. Right? I am sure a lot of people would want to be able to fix this issue. If you are out there, do make a comment about your experience with this bot followers situation.
Much regards
JBN
Resteem and upvote will be highly appreciated.
I agree, it's totally out of control. Remember though that we recently learned from the Davemccoy and Lukestokes exchange that Ned views us as labrats and that Steemit doesn't care about the first million users, they only care about the next 100 million. So they're just going to keep working out the kinks on the blockchain while we all struggle with issues from the interface. Honestly, we probably have a better shot of fixing things by petitioning Busy to change things.
That's a good idea @themanwithnoname. I forget that Busy can do stuff like this too.
What incentive do they have to make things better? Do you know?
I've never thought about it before but I wonder how they earn, they seem to pay out rather than take in.
As @jbn says below, I also believe it was a community project. It was supported and designed to showcase what you can do on the Steem blockchain. The upvote they give is because of their delegation and was to help people get used to using other apps by giving incentive to do so.
Although apps have the ability to charge a portion of the rewards, Busy chooses not to do so. Dtube is one that if you post with them, they might upvote your post, but regardless, they take a 25% fee (I believe that's the number) for using their service to post. It's how they pay for development, I guess. So they could earn, but they choose not to. Might have to do with their deal for the delegation.
Well long may Busy's delegation continue @themanwithnoname. It's a good upvote for me. 😁
You must have quite a few followers then as their upvote is based on the SP of those who follow you. I hope your upvotes continue!
I don't know @themanwithnoname. I'm approaching 1000 but many of those are bots, especially recently.
Also it depends on one's definition of good upvote. I just had a chat with someone who referred to a 0.68 upvote as small. That to be is huge! 😁
Also, I haven't been able to work out how busy decide on their upvotes. They seem to be all over the place for me.
They were much bigger in the past but maybe that's to do with the price of Steem. They were about 17c for the longest time then suddenly jumped to over 60c then over $1 at the end of April and then back to 60c.
Then there's the whole busy pay thing. I don't get how that works either. 😊
I would still classify $0.68 as a good upvote. That's just me though.
I normally get around $0.15 upvote from Busy. I've never seen the $1 ones that you speak of, so you must be doing something right! Good for you!
I don't know anything about busy pay, so can't advise you at all there. If I hear something though, I can try to pass the info along.
Yep. I agree. I had a typo in my comment. I meant to say that $0.68 to me is huge @themanwithnoname. 😁
I hope whatever happened to me in relation to Busy happens to you too soon.
Busy.org is more of a community project. Its not an upvote bot. They have created something for community. I dont think earning from it was their top most priority.
I'm personally very grateful to them @jbn. They are one of my most consistent supporters! 😊
I believe that i might have missed out on that conversation between @lukestokes and @davemccoy that you are talking about but suffice to say that they are right. Can we petition busy.org? I dont use busy.org on regular basis since it absolutely sucks on my iPhone 6. Not their fault but yeah, m grabbing a new snapdragon 710 armed phone soon and then probably will shift to busy.org
However it is more than interface problem.. its the problem with blockchain itself. No matter if its busy.org or steemit.com, bot followers / accounts will remain a menace. Its worrysome
Sorry, I couldn't find the link at the time and hadn't tagged them as I didn't want to bring up old business if they had moved on. I found the link though, so here's Luke's post.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@lukestokes/a-comment-reply-turned-into-a-root-post
I would imagine that if the interface changed the rules, that you could prevent someone from following you. I don't think that would have to be at the blockchain level. Then again, I'm not an expert on this topic.
Read the article by Luke and the lack of responsiveness by Steemit will make a lot more sense. It was actually very freeing for me to realize that things aren't "supposed to be better here." It took a lot of the pressure off to help fix things because this interface doesn't matter. It is going to be scrubbed and rewritten anyways.
First of all. My apologies for reading your comment so late. Second of all, you are absolutely right. I have read the article and you are most definitely right ..
It's all good, no worries. Yeah, it was disappointing at first, but once you lower your expectations then everything you get is a bonus, rather than something you're owed... and then you're less likely to get discouraged.
This is something I have noticed myself as a new user on the platform. The only time my follower count would move is immediately after posting like you mentioned. For new users this can be really discouraging as they look for some social interaction from the community. I have chosen to push forward and look past some of the platforms short comings, but I would guess many users walk away and never turn back.
Keep up with the commenting @ross-early. Relationships are all on this platform! 😊
Well maybe not all but that's the only way to make headway, in the early days, unless you can buy yourself about 1000SP.
Thanks for the advice! I'm always looking to reach out and connect with other creators on the platform. I definitely cannot afford to buy any SP so I will be going at it the slow and steady route, which I know will pay off in the long run anyhow.
Have you heard of @dustsweeper @ross-early?
If not, look it up. it's a great service and I highly recommend it for all newbies. 😊
No I haven't! I will be taking advantage of it right now lol. I should probably search a newbie's guide to steemit that has valuable things like this mentioned. THANKS!
You are most welcome @ross-early!
Good luck with it all! 😊
I sincerely feel for you and you are right. But overlooking a problem can only get us so far. By not speaking, we actually encourage these rascals to keep doing what they are doing to a point where this will corrupt the entire platform..
Good point on overlooking the problem. I was referring to more of my "low influence" on the platform at the moment and not letting the issue discourage me from the grind.
Well... if you put it that way, you are right..
I've mentioned this to a couple of witnesses @jbn.
These accounts are dead easy to spot and are often created in groups of ten with consecutive numbers.
The follow thousands of people and post a single image with no text or plagiarised youtube videos.
I got so pissed off with it one day I spent an hour reporting accounts to Steem Cleaners which elicited a message from them on Discord telling me they don't deal with videos and I should stop wasting my time.
I'm approaching 1000 followers now and it's taken all the joy out it. I won't be celebrating when I hit that milestone because I know so many of the more recent ones are bots.
A friend of mine joined 2 months ago and now has over 200 followers. Approximately 15 of those are real people. He has made a post every day and every day gets followed by a load more bots.
It's another reason why I don't understand people celebrating 1 million users. What good are they if they're mostly bots?
I think paulag did a post recently where she showed that human commenting accounted for about 15% of comments and the rest were bots.
Anyway. Bit of a rant but I'm with you. May of them are easy to identify at sign up. And past that it would be easy to block them as a user. Then if they got a certain number of blocks they could be shut down.
I appreciate your enthusiasm and your will to make this place a better place, however i fear that the solution is way out of your reach. Steemcleaners can only go so far.. unless the top 21 witnesses, ned and dan come together to solve this issue at blockchain level, i am afraid its gonna continue to spread like a damned virus.
You are right. Many of these accounts are dead easy to spot. But can somebody allocate this much time trying to identify these maniacs?? Thats the real question.. and the real problem is that they will continue to be in your followers list.
Yep. You're right @jbn in terms of the time it takes to spot these accounts manually but the patterns are so obvious there it ought to be fairly easy to do automatically I would think.
Here's a block I found when I was replying to paulag's post:
address100
address101
address102
address103
address104
address105
address106
address107
address108
address109
Those ought to be child's play to stop even signing up in the first place. But, of course they aren't all named like that and, in the end, if there's no will from the people with the power to stop it to do so, I suppose we're snookered.
I don't understand enough about how it all works but there do seem to have been some apps built to tackle stuff that needed doing and wasn't being done. That one the looks out for people using private keys in their memo fields, for example.
But I suppose all these good apps happen after accounts have been created so they are different.
If the governing authority is not willing to make its platform better then there is hrdly anything we can do.. but you are right. Identifying these culprits is one thing however, rooting them out is another, which is way beyond our control..
Hola soy nuevo aquí y de verdad he visto esto de los robots y es extraño, porque mientras la mayoría de las plataformas se esfuerzan para que no sean controladas o dominadas por bots... Acá está como felices de la bot-manía
tienes toda la razón mi amigo.
I have to admit that I have read and reread this for several times including the comments until I have grasped the idea and this made me realized that you (sir @jbn) have made a remarkable post and again, another worthy contribution to this community. I just pray that this will really catch the attention of all concern and will really do something about this problem. Been really busy the past months and I barely do some steeming and I really appreciate your time that you really dig deep and do research whenever you post and please keep sharing to us your wisdom. Thank you so much sir & God bless po :-)
Thank you po for such kind words..
You are right sir as i also realize the issue. Whenever i publish a post, suddenly some people start following me but i don't understand that they are bot. But your wonderful explanation clear my concept. Steemit should remove these bots or control them.
We are now past the “should, would, could” game and we need to do something right now or we will lose this platform for good..
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STOPThis really makes me wonderinv too... Happy that finally I got to see such a post...
I thought it was only happening to me @jbn ! Hmm hmmm.