Steem Spam Bots Taking Over
Have you noticed your follower count going up a lot recently, maybe more than normal, even though you weren’t being more active? That’s what I’ve seen over the past few weeks. I started with about 150 followers, and now have 236.
After posting yesterday, I saw my follower count go up by 13 over just a few minutes. This was already looking very suspicious, so I used a tool called Steem Followers to see who was following me (I also saw that in the span of a few minutes I gained 50% more followers than my largest gain in one day ever).
So I start viewing the accounts of those who were following me:
And the list goes on and on. Each one of these accounts are following over 7000 people, with some of them following thousands of people per day. These accounts were all created in March, very recently.
One of these accounts has almost 6000 followers already. And guess what they are doing:
There are most likely over 50 of these accounts out there, and @steem is delegating 15 SP to all of them, allowing them to self vote and have enough bandwidth to spam post and follow:
Sadly, Steemit’s broken registration system has allowed for so many of these blatantly spammy bots to spread... If @steem stopped delegating to them this entire problem would be over, but, alas, that is probably not going to happen any time soon. The only thing we can do is flag them to destroy their reputation.
Head over to Steem Followers and see how many spam followers you have! Flag them to death!
Ya, sometimes when I make a post I'll see a notification on busy with like 5 new followers within a minute. It's funny because none of them have profile pictures and all the posts are about food, haha. Makes it really easy to tell it's a spam account. Is there some kind of spam account filtering system in steemit? From what I've seen it'd be really easy to have an automated AI system identify most of these accounts. They're not very original, haha.
Yes, I agree that an automated AI system would be perfect. And no, there is no spam account filter except account creation. It costs a bit of Steem to create an account, but Steemit will do it for free if you just provide some information. These bots were probably created by using spammy account information.
If they put more effort into writing the posts, they could make a lot more money!
This post has received a 0.35 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @shredz7.
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Thx for sharing your experience and the link. I just made my first post and was wondering why i already have 80 followers. Looks like they are all fake... Steemit is a great idea but the spaming is a serious problem, hope there will be updates to this. I dont see "normal" people joining steemit when we cant overcome this. Anyways steemit is still in its very young stage and maybe it just needs more time to mature, lets hope for the best! :D