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RE: February '19 New STEEM Account Report
All accounts set up by steemit inc get delegation (15sp or something) and as 85% of accounts are set up via steem inc, its no sure way to know they have any intent. Infact steemit inc produce the most amount of voting only accounts, so the intentions of vote farming from free delegations could be the only intent.
You know it's a terrible world when I actually look for something positive to say and you shoot me down. Legitimately!
What a world, what a world.
I suppose to try and filter that out would require looking to see how many new accounts received delegations of something other than 15 SP, though that would really carry only minimal information of any kind of use.
At some point, we just have to try and figure out what the most meaningful indicator is of useful activity. Myself, I lean toward active voting as one of the few things we can observe that might indicate some level of intentionality, given that most users of every social network are primarily consumers of content – but that being essentially indistinguishable from a bot purely interested in voting based on some sort of external bid or intent means that the information content is less than ideal.
It may be that the only useful information we can look forward to is next month's number of created accounts.
This is one of the strong reason that I keep advocating that we should be promoting "the steem blockchain" for its usefulness as the database backend for a set of entangled social media platforms and not as a crypto-commodity. Of course, to do so we would have to have developers who wanted to focus on the social media side rather than the wallet/commodity side, and I don't know if that is ever going to happen.
(No insult meant to the developers of Busy or Steempeak, the latter of which is my preferred interface, but they aren't really adding to the mechanisms around social media architectures. Hell, Gab, for all that Dissenter is a retread of several other comment systems created earlier last decade, is at least trying to do some new things. It's a shame that someone on the steem blockchain didn't get there first.)
lol I have to laugh, my turn to shoot you down was over due.
I do think the accounts being set up by other rather than steemit inc is interesting and as time goes this can be used as a filter on other analysis, such as churn. But for this report, for me, the % of accounts that complete their about section is a good but by no means accurate indicator of intention
Everybody gets five minutes in the autocannon. It is a functional inevitability.
If I were writing or designing a system which created bot accounts and empowered them for vote harvesting, one of the things I would do for absolute sure is have it generate some sort of procedurally random account profile because it wouldn't have to be very convincing to be convincing enough. Pull a random landscape image off of Facebook or Google images for the background, generate some random demographic info, pull names from a pool created from Facebook and Twitter, and away you go. It would be very hard to distinguish between a legitimate new user and something of that order.
Which complicates the analysis, unfortunately.
One day I would really love to sit down and interview someone who runs one of the major bot farms and talk about the process that they use, how much automation they use or not, all of that stuff in creating and targeting bot swarms for social media platforms. I'm endlessly fascinated by that sort of thing and since I have a complete absence of moral judgment, don't mind talking to anybody.
It would just be interesting.
it would be very interesting