Option For Removing Followers on Steemit
Preface
Steemit is all about engagement with the community. So with that prelude, followers play a vital role in one’s journey on steemit. Normally people take alot of pride when their number of following reach to a milestone like 100, 500, 1000 so on and so forth. With the evolution of steemit, a lot of bots have come into play whose primary job is to start following regular steemit users to advertise or worse for phishing scams.
A steemit user has full control over the list of people he / she is following, however there is a growing need to be able to have same controls over one’s followers.
Steemit users are finding it difficult to grasp that even with 500 followers, they are still not visible on platform. This is majorly because of alot of bots / dead accounts following them.
Solution / Proposal
In order to be able to get a true picture of number of people following ones account, the option to “remove” dead accounts / bot accounts is mendatory.
The option of forcebly removing someone from following you will help discourage the practice of creating spam / bot accounts.
Furthermore, steemit users can well organize their followers list to keep better track of those who actively participate in their blogs.
Examples / GUI design prototype
Foregone in view, proposed changes can be incorporated in steemit condenser as below:-
Fig 1 : Clicking the “Followers” option will reveal followers in alphabetical order
Fig 2 : An option of “Remove” follower would be displayed against each follower’s username
Benefits of said proposal
The advantages from adding this feature to platform will be threepronged :-
Decluttering of followers by discarding dead / bot accounts
Discouragement of creation of bot accounts
More visibility of active followers, which in turn shall yield further fruitful engagement on platform.
I sincerely hope that devs would be able to incorporate such a basic feature onto platform to further refine the experience of engagement for all steemit users.
Thank you
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Indeed. I agree.
There is no point of increasing the number of followers if you can't keep track all of them. This way you will invite unwanted dead accounts and phishers.
You can simply flag the unwanted comments on your posts, and the phishers will remove themselves from your wall.
I have a question though, for minnows like myself doesn't having many followers help in the visibility of my post ?
No it doesnt.. having many followers has nothing to do with visibility. Actually when people say that they have 500 followers, they say that under thr assumption that maximum of those are active followers who contribute towards his blog by upvoting and commenting.. today, you can create 1000 accounts and tell them all to follow you. Won’t help with the visibility though..
I agree and good observation. I see a lot of them with lots of followers but still struggling with visits on their posts. It's a great idea to declutter.
Yes you are right
I agree, sir. And thank you so much for sharing this information to everyone here. Upvoted and resteemed for all my followers and readers' information. Many are being victimized by these scammers and hackers and we really need to be very careful. God bless and Happy Easter po :-)
Thank you po.. and happy easter to you too and to ypur nanay.. :)
totally agree
what is the fun of having tons of followers when they don't engage, don't contribute
i would prefer 10 interested followers over these 1000 bot acounts
Absolutely true
I agree. This would be very helpful. To trim out the deadwood would make my blog a lot easier to manage!
That's a good advice.
Number of followers doesn't matter right now. There are people with 10k followers and 25 rep here
You are spot on
Thanks for diverting our attention towards bots who are pishing scammers in the hide of followers. Every one love followers but only active followers should be in your list. keep sharing @jbn
It's good to have a control on followers. But not necessary because pishing bots can find from many ways. I have noticed many users or bots who are not following me but sometimes comments pishing.
True but its good to at least stop them in one way if not all..
I'd really like to be able to remove followers. I don't know what the point of those accounts following me is as they never do anything. Maybe then they can start a "resteem service" if those people follow them back, but they don't provide value.
Maybe utopian can look into my idea for blocking incoming wallet transactions from spammers. That would be nice too! :)
Yes i totally agree with you. And your idea incoming transactions by spammers are absolutely spot on.. i would love to read it.. can you provide me the link to your contribution?
Sure, I didn't want to just drop links without checking with you first.
I believe the infrastructure for this is already in place.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@themanwithnoname/wallet-fix-stop-the-scams-spam
Wonderful. You were manage to cover all the basis and i couldnt agree with you more. sorry that the post is 9 days old so i cant upvote it.. but i gotta ask that you should have posted it in utopian. You would have got a healthy upvote with it..
Thanks, I'm glad that it makes sense. I didn't know what the requirements were for posting in Utopian. I was thinking about trying to make a mockup and then re-posting.
I agree with you 100% just recently i crossed the landmark of 100 followers, still when i post new post hardly there are any views of post irrespective of how good my post is. Without opening any post, how can we judge it ?
Do you have any ratio as out of 100 or 1000, how much are real accounts ?? Just idea ?
Last but not least, this is great idea to put this simple button but lots of bots are marketing for resteem highlighting followers, they wont use that button :)
No brother, there is no specific ratio for real vs bot spam accounts but i can tell you one thing. Real active accounts are always less than 50% of total following.. it is pertinent to note that there are a lot of dead accounts too (which to be fair i deem as useless followers), this is alarming, really..
And this feature will help clear out clutter...
Noted with thanks bro, hope someone listen to you and make that remove button soon :) My followers move from 100 to 110 in couple of days but i am no more exited about it :(
Apparently it is not a “desired” solution according to utopian moderators. Infact they have straightaway failed to register this nuisance as a problem in the first place. May be they have some stake in it. I wouldnt be surprised if alot of those spam bots are connected to @utopian-io moderators or some of the whales.
Fear not, utopian rewards open source contributions but i am not in it for the rewards.. i will make sure that this goes upwards to the devs with or without utopian’s involvement..
Noted with thanks, however i am very unfamiliar with @utopian-io moderators. Who are they ? Do i need to study about them as they are relevant to Steemit ? thank you for your help