How Should the Steemit Community Deal With Comment Spam?
Yikes! That's a garish and ugly banner picture. But do you know what else is garish and ugly? Comment spam.
It happened again. How many times will I have to see comments like this?
"Vote for vote?"
"Very helpful your information. Now upvote mine."
"Hello dear, I follow you, now you follow?"
"How Should the Steemit Community Deal with Comment Spam is a very good topic"
I could give a million more examples, but they're all basically the same:
They are useless, nothing comments that are always begging for an upvote.
Yes, I said "always." Whether these users explicitly ask for a vote or not is irrelevant. It's what they're all looking for. They comment on my blog in the hope that I'll give them a penny or two and they usually have the audacity to do so without even voting on my post.
How Should the Community Deal with This?
Let me tell you a bit about my personal history of dealing with spammers. I have three methods, and SPOILER ALERT, methods 1 and 2 don't work very well.
Method 1: Ignore Them
This was my original modus operandi. I wouldn't give them an upvote and I wouldn't give them any attention. I liked to imagine them writing their stupid little comments and dreaming of a big payday, only to have me crush their dreams.
The problem with this method is that I'm not the spammers only source of potential income. They spam all over the place. And guess what! Someone out there rewards them for it. They must. Otherwise the spammers would have given up by now.
Method 1 doesn't work so long as there are any Steemians out there who continue to upvote garbage posts and garbage comments. So stop it. Don't reward them.
Method 2: Mess with Them
When ignoring them didn't seem to make them go away, I decided to start messing with them and shaming them for daring to pollute my comment feed with such rubbish.
Ladies and gentlemen, you're in for a treat. Presented as one collection for the very first time is a selection of Seth Tomlinson's recent spammers and his responses!
What's up with that last one? What even are some of those words and why is that exact message being shared by different spammers? Do they have a club where they get together to exchange their terrible ideas for making money on Steemit?
Messing with the spammers is fun. But here's why it doesn't work: the spammers don't stick around to read the replies. I don't think any of them ever respond to my comments. That's because they are just as disinterested in that conversation as they were in the blog post that they were commenting on. They're only interested in suckering other Steemians into wasting some of their voting power on their blather.
Method 3: The Flag
The dreaded flag. The thing I can so rarely bring myself to use on Steemit...
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I hate flagging. I hate using my voting power to against someone else. I try to look at it as a last resort, but sometimes it is necessary.
Methods 1 and 2 haven't works. Maybe Method 3 will.
As a community, if we don't like certain behaviour on the platform, we shouldn't just ignore it. We should de-incentivize it. We should hit them where it hurts: their wallet and their reputation.
By flagging, we can take away their post rewards. If they continue behaving this way, they will continue getting flagged until their reputation will be down in the dirt. I'll probably still mess with the spammers too... because it's fun.
I love Steemit and I want it to be a good place. In order to keep it that we, we have to be vigilant. I'm no longer going to tolerate shitty, money-grabbing behaviour on my blog. If you leave a worthless comment, you WILL be flagged.
From now on, all of my posts will end with this graphic to serve as a warning to spammers:
I doubt the graphic will make much of a difference since the spammers tend not to read the posts, but it's worth a shot. Feel free to steal it and use it on your own blog.
Let's clean up Steemit!
~Seth
P.S. Not all short comments are worthless. Don't be afraid to leave simple words of encouragement. I'll try to be a fair judge. It's usually easy to tell the spam apart from the genuine posts. If you're a regular follower and commenter on my blog, I will certainly recognize you and won't punish you for telling my in few words that you liked my art or my writing.
You can report them to @steemcleaners through their interface and make rewards by doing so. I upvote all the good comments I get and go back to my post on day 5-6. The ones I did not vote for, I look to see what they are posting on their blogs. If they seem to be trying, I give them some of my steemit help posts to look at. I report the others to steemcleaners.
That's a good method. It's cool that you actually follow up on the blogs of "bad" commenters to see if they're actually putting in an effort. I respect that, but I don't know if I have the willpower to do the same...
I use tactic #1. I really don't like using tactic #3 because I see it as a waste of my voting power. I want the posts I upvote to get as big a boost as I can give them, and if I go around flagging all the spam comments I receive, I'm diluting the good I can do with my upvote.
Honestly, it doesn't really bother me that much. Most of my posts get a lot of genuine comments, and I upvote those. Anyone else who happens along to read my post will see the thoughtful, engaging comments first. Then if they scroll far enough to see the spam comments, they'll probably know what the deal is with those. I also have empathy for the spammers. I think a lot of them are a) from countries where a few cents is a decent amount of money, and b) have no experience with content creation, and c) speak English as a second language or not at all. So I don't reward them, but I also don't want to punish them beyond the natural consequences of not having their comments upvoted.
You have a lot more compassion than I do. It's just been getting under my skin lately.
I do plan to be careful with my flagging. I'll look at the profiles of the "spammers" first to see if they really are trying. Consequently, I'll probably continue to let a lot of these bad comments slide without a flag.
I really like the mute button
I literally just realized that that button exists. Haha!
I always knew there was this button beside the "follow" button, but I guess my brain never processed it. I may make use of that in the future. But I'm still going to flag, muting them may spare me from a bit of spam but it won't get to the root of the problem. I think we need to show spammers that we aren't going to tolerate them on Steemit.
VERY POSITIVE NEWS DEAR SIR! I FOLLOW YOU NOW! RESTEEMED AND REBLOGGED AND RECUMMED! YOU ARE A INSPIRATIONAL TO ME!!!
You had me going there for a second. I was ready to flag!
Hehe. I agree it's incredibly irritating, and increasing in volume. I used to never flag anyone, but I've started to flag all these dear sir amazing positive news comments.
The horrible uses of "dear" and "sir" do make me laugh though. Is someone coaching these people on how to interact using English online? If so, they're doing a bad job.
I never used to flag either. I'd rather save my voting power to reward people. But the rapid increase in the volume of worthless dreck is getting so irritating.
Must be some weird misinterpretation of western culture..One often think that the world is so globalized, but often forget that these countries lack the same understanding of us, as we do of them. Hell..not many years ago MANY americans that I met thought Norwegians were like inuits. Like these weird mongoloids carving wood sculptures and living in Igloes. OR for some reason they had AN UNCLE IN BERGEN! Like, 50% had an uncle in Bergen for some weird reason..
Anyway..but yeah, it's almost like they have taken a course by some dude who's been to London and learned how to interact with Lords or something. "Mjeees dear sire, I bow to thee, and welcome thee. Your post invigorated me immensely dear sire. Oh, papaa, please. Can I too run across the meadow field? Oh thank you so much dear papaaa."
Whenever I see comments like the last one I always think of the Simpsons episode where Homer is trying to read off his hand but the ink got smudged.
I used to have to deal with them too but ever since I switched my blog focus to only french posts, the problem got considerably reduced (with only 1 every 5 posts or so). Of course they won't read replies, I mean, they see Steem as a money maker only and not as what it actually is. Besides, I believe some of them are bots. That would explain the same comments you received from two different accounts, just a guy creating a script and then using it on multiple accounts.
Anyway, just like you I enjoy messing with them. They are there anyway so why not making fun of them ? Tried the polite approach once, got flagged (lol), never again. Unlike you though, I don't hate flagging, it's there exactly for that reason so why not using it ? Just for fun, here is my favorite reply yet :D
My favorite way to deal with them is to politely let them know its not acceptable and I wont be supporting them. If they want upvotes they should make good comments and make good content! That and I upvote everyone elses comments haha. Only when people are mean or really persistently spammy will I flag.
It's been a while since I've politely let them know that they're spamming haha. I do see where you're coming from, as that's how I used to think. I guess I'm just getting fed up.
Haha I suppose you have a bigger blog and more traffic. I try not to let stuff like that bother me, playing around with it is fun too though haha, lots of sassy ways to reply.
I am wondering, if it's really always upvote fishing. I could imagine that newbies are not aware sometimes. In the beginning I was so excited about finding a community providing much better content than those I knew before, I wanted to upvote almost everything and tell people how "nice" their posts are. ^^ But I think I already startet back then to tell them WHAT I found nice about their posts. I guess I have to take a look on the first comments I made. XD
Sad thing though, flagging will become more popular because of being necessary.
I think it becomes really obvious that the posts are upvote fishing when they don't even bother to upvote the blog they're commenting on.
I wish flagging wasn't necessary, but here we are...
You are right. In that case it is really obvious. I looked on that profile of the guy you flagged... did he resteem your post before or after flagging?
Hmm. I'm not sure. All I checked for initially was whether he upvoted or not... and he didn't
Mmh I see. That would be an interesting new effect: resteem for flagging. XD
I completely agree @sethlinson ! There are many new users signingup daily, so I guess old community members have to cope up with short comments ;-)
I'm done coping. I'm ready to deal with it! ;)
I just want to give you a brief feedback so please don't judge me or flag this short comment!
I think mentioning the problem is very important and as you say the whole community has to work against this kind of spammers. I'm also looking forward to improve my style of commenting. I enjoyed reading your post and hope the "spamming-situation" will improve for all Steemians.
I won't flag. Like I said in the post, not all short comments are worthless. It's usually pretty easy to tell the difference between spam and a meaningful short comment. Thanks for commenting!