The rise of the Steemit bots - part 2
Read part 1
I recommend you reading 💙😱 What Has Happened To My Beloved Steemit !?💙😱 by @karenmckersie as it describes very well the way I think the rise of some Steemit bots is hurting the community.
In the last two days I have met a new bot spam type: the tip bot.
The tip bot works by sending a lot of 0.001 SBD transactions with an advertising memo. Unlike comment spam, tip spam is not free, but it has two big advantages: it is more visible because receiving transactions is less common that receiving comments, and the tip cannot be hidden by downvotes.
In two days I have received two of this transactions:
@curator-whale resteemed this post introducing the tip tool The original code of the tool was created by @msg768 , here is the complaint article. And here is the tipper tool by @msg768
Although the tool can be quite useful for informing your followers or giving them an small giveaway, it is also quite useful for spamming. @msg768 has received this transactions in the last days:
So that means that @joanaltres used the @msg768 tool for the spam. As the fee of the service is 0.001SBD, the message was sent to 4729 people. Let´s see what message sent the other users of this tool.
So 3 of the 3 users applied for the minimum fee and used the tool for promoting their articles or services. The best part of Tipper is that opt-out is quite easy, by just unfollow the user that sends the tips in case you find them annoying.
Please let me know in the comments what do you think about this. If you do not like this use of the tool, politely ask @msg768 for increasing the minimum amount of the tip.
On the long term, in my opinion the way to ban this type of uses would be the same I proposed in part 1:
A dynamic system based on reputation that limits the submit of articles, comments and transactions. When a limit of comments is reached in a certain period of time, a cooling time that can be dismissed by completing a captcha would be triggered. The higher the reputation the less restrictive is that limit. Replies to mentions and exchanges are not affected by that rule.
Image from Google reCAPTCHA
I would like to know your suggestions about how to deal with this behaviours on Steemit.
Yes I think reputation needs to become more central, and have amuch bigger impact. Block-chains ussually charge for transactions and this counters spam, but steemit does not do this, instead concepts like bandwidth are in play.
I think your rep should impact your bandwidth, 25 rep and above no effect, but as your rep drops your bandwidth should become exponentially constrained.
I also feel this should be the same for downvote impact, so low rep users cant so easily buy STEEM and go on downvote revenge trips.
Thanks for your comment. I like your idea of applying the same bandwith for 25 rep and above, that way the captchas may not be necessary.
AFAIK though reputation is just on the steemit.com web interface, its not part of the block-chain, so other sites based on the chain could by-pass the reputation feature. It would need work from the steem devs to implement.
What do you expect from a website that pays for votes, views, articles? People (bots) will create bait clicks as often as it's profitable.
And our job is try to make it unprofitable. The online advertising companies have the same problem and the business keeps running.