Spam Posts Pissing Me Off. Data Please Identify Someone That Can Make It Stop!

I like to keep track of my mentions here on Steemit. After all if someone goes to the bother of writing about you or linking to one of your posts, it should be acknowledged.  I have always been an advocate for looking after your followers and people that spread your message.

The first mention is awesome.  There is a feeling of success, a feeling of acknowledgement, of recognition.  In fact the second mention and the third mention and the fourth and fifth and subsequent mentions feel special.  The more mentions and link backs the more motivated I become. 

Until this

  

Multiple accounts producing similar stats reports.  I have a pain in my face looking at these filling up my mentions feed and cluttering tags here on steemit.  To me they are just making good content hard to find.

Now I am not saying this content is not good, the stats are interesting the first time you see them.  Then maybe if you see them again a month or two later, but every few hours, what the heck? and I am a data lover.

So me being me, and being the data loveer I am, I decided to take a deeper look into the activity on these accounts.  Try and find out who is responsible or who knows who is responsible

Initially I started with these account @monitorcap @vertical @trafficmonitor @markboss 

Below are from steemworld.org.  @markboss was set up the ‘official way’ and so was @applbliz.  @markboss then set up @monitorcap and then @monitorcap set up @vertical.  And a new account to the circle is @applbiz set up @trafficmonitor

 

 

 

 

 

The next step was to look into these account using steemsql held and managed by   @arcange 

First I connected to the TxVotes table and I filtered the author to shown only the accounts in question.  This returns a table of all votes given to these account.

  

From the table it is clear to see that @markboss and @trafficmonitor are voting a lot, and looking further into it, voting on their own posts.

But then we have @malekalmsaddi, @eyesonsky, @anomaly and @ubg also voting a lot on these accounts.  So I have added these to the list.

Now looking at the same report, the only account I can find that is voting for each of these 8 account is @ubg

  

The next step was to look at the votes made by @ubg only to see if there are other accounts that could also be tied into this circle

The table below shows the authors that @ubg has voted for over time along with the average voting weight.

  

Both @markboss and @trafficmonitor are showing on this list with an average voting weight of just 1%. So I thought it would be interesting to see if I sorted the list by the voting weight how it would look.  There were 43,532 authors voted for at 1%

  

From the list @appbliz does not appear here, but @appbliz has received 41 votes @1% from @ubg and 293 from @anomaly

 

Conclusion

I did go on further with the analysis and found more links between these accounts and @malekalmsaddi, @eyesonsky, @anomaly.  I have a good feeling these accounts know who owns @monitorcap @vertical @trafficmonitor @markboss

However there are stronger suggestions from the data that @ubg knows all about this, after all @ubg is the oldest of any of these accounts listed..

So this is a shout out to @ubg to have a chat with this bot owner and make it stop, these posts are not adding value and are a real pain in the ass.

If you agree or disagree with my feelings on the posts from these accounts, please do comment below

@fyrstikken has already given @anomaly @markboss and @ubg some downvotes

@steemcleaners has downvoted @malekalmsaddo, @markboss, @moniorcao and @trafficmonitor too.

Do you know any of the accounts in these lists that I did not analyse?  Maybe you could leave a comment below with any insights you would like to share.  I am sure there are more accounts that could be bots out of the 43,523 accounts that voted for a 1%.  I just hope that they are not all bots.

If you have dealt with any of them please do comment below

 I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you...

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