I asked few questions from you in my Mana - What Has Changed? post. Obviously I didn't get as much answers as @themarkymark did in his post, but every single answer is important to me. Thank you for answering!
Go and leave a comment to How do you feel about Hard Fork 20? post too if you have important things to say. Your comment on @themarkymark's post might have a bit wider audience and bigger influence, especially if you have some ideas about what could be different here in Steemit.
I wanted answers and I got answers! Now let's look at those one by one.
Is there spam in your posts as much as there was about a month ago?
- No spam @bluerobo
- Almost Zero spam. Before the fork it was a nightmare. @trincowski
- I don't really post that much, but I do get more attention these days. Not much spam, though that might be changing? @eccles
- Holy crap! Where did all those spammers come from?! There I was hoping to read a few responses and there's 6 inane comments!! Did you trigger them by writing 'spam' or something? @minismallholding
- Whats up with this spammers XD. Are you creating all of these accounts? @cave-man
(If I missed anyone's answer, please inform me.)
I swear, I didn't do this. I mean, these are not my accounts and I don't control them. I may have triggered those with one or two of my tags, and if so, I may get some spammers to this post too because I want to use the correct tags. Let's see what happens.
Although I don't believe in flagging that much, I had to go and flag them at day 6 because this is one of those occasions when a flag or two is really handy and a good reason to flag someone. To get rid of spam comments. Abuse and harassing is the second and even a better reason than spam.
My answer and opinion
I didn't have that much spam in my posts before HF20 and I don't have it now. Except this one freak occasion. I have never been that popular so I'm not that attractive to spammers I guess. But now that I'm looking at the accounts that are popular and now that time has passed, are the spammers coming back? I think they are. Little by little.
If creating the account is as easy as it was before (or maybe even easier?) and pumping money to the account to get more SP ans RC, how is that exactly reducing other than those spammers who don't want / can't invest money to Steemit?
I'm not exactly sure what the one or two liner comment spammers hope to achieve on their comments, but nevertheless those are in the way of real comments and real people. I can only guess what would happen if more people would be fooled by those kind of comments, answer to them and the accounts start to gain more rep and of course profit from curating and maybe invest some money too.
Those accounts could also be here to find week spots. Or it might be that in the future, at some convenient time, the comments wouldn't be this nice as they are now. Those comments could also be hate speech. Those accounts could be dormant weapons. Agitators. I don't know. But you have to admit it is possible. As a matter a fact very likely too. You never know.
Do you have any wild guesses or elaborate schemes on the origins and purpose of these accounts?
Most users don't have the SP needed to create even one free account, especially spammers who tend to have almost no SP.
New accounts start with 0 voting power, so they cannot be used to farm. They also have so low RC they can only post 3 comments every 5 days. So they can't spam post/comment.
They will need to power up to do more than that, and most spammers are powering down and selling.
It's not perfect, it never will be. Spam will always exist, but it has reduced the amount of spam considerably. Here's an example.
I have a bot called @badcontent, that posts a comment whenever someone on my blacklist makes a new post. Under HF19 it would post 2700-3500 comments a day. 3500 is around the max limit due to the 20 second delay, so it could have actually been much higher than 3500 a day.
Under HF20, the bot is only posting 200-500 comments a day. That's a huge difference.
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Thank you for extremely fast comment! :)
I agree, there's no one solution that would make things perfect. And I also agree that spam has reduced. I sure do love numbers and charts and believe in them. :) And I'm glad that spammers are powering down, instead of trying harder. So this was one of the good things in HF20.
But when those spammers that are here only for the money and maybe throw few phishing links here and there, are mostly gone, are those also who have the money, lots and lots of it? Their plans might be something else than making more money. Information war for instance.
I'm not saying that HF20 should have fixed all kind of spammers. This is just my way of thinking further. And creating wild theories.
And I would really like to know the purpose and perhaps also origin of those few spammers that I encountered on my old post. I'd like to ask them: why?
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That or some script kiddie just found out about STEEM and decided to test if he could get away with some simple spam. These bot accounts are on ice right now -- they stopped posting all at once, so the owner is either biding their time until they can think of something or (hopefully) wrote it off as a loss?
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:D So you took the Skynet option. A dumb version of it. Arnold S. has given his face to one of the accounts so that would be possible. Steemit could be the birth place of future Skynet.
And you other option is script kiddie. That could be true, but as I am what I am, my moneys on the Skynet option! :D Toddler Skynet is here.
So the real question is not: "If you could go back in time, would you kill Hitler when he was a baby?" It's: "Now that we are witnessing the born of Skynet, will and can we kill it now?"
So what'll it be?
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As an advocate of ethical treatment of machine intelligence I would like to chose not to antagonize the electronic overmind..
"Educate, Not Exterminate" :)
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Educating the toddler Skynet might require hacking as it's in really close contact of it's creator. Perhaps we have to wait until the Skynet is a teenager, roaming around the Steemit city without it's parent(s) and them not knowing what it's doing and with who it is hanging. But is everything too late then? To intervene the upbringing when someone is a teenager?
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Hm, tough questions! But if the digital brain was designed for neuroplasticity, like our meaty ones, a sentient Skynet could continue learning new ideas and concepts throughout its hypothetical lifespan.
Machine intelligence, as we are building it is really not that different from our own, it's a crucial point of most apocalyptic Sci-Fi stories that we're never shown the logical chain which leads a in intelligent being to conclude that total destruction or forceful subjugation is the optimal solution for dealing with the whole mankind situation -- because it's not. Human behaviour can be controlled and directed -- why confront someone who would serve you willingly given the right incentive and pretext?
With humans we can't just go and lobotomise anyone we want to act according to our desires. Right now we can do that with AI. But what if we had an AI that we couldn't control directly? We'd have to learn to adapt behavioural science to its digital neurology.
Ah, sorry for deviating from the question and going on this metaphisical rant. Let's just say that with the right attitude and knowledge of a brain's design it's never too late to reprogram it :)
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I haven't got a clue. Maybe they are users who don't speak enough English to write anything better?
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Maybe. But the comments and the profile background images are too similar to be from different people. Could be but I think not. I think these are all from one person or group. All of those comments appeared almost immediately after I published the post, within the first 5 or 10 minutes if I remember correctly.
https://steemit.com/@wivelegeboeing/comments
https://steemit.com/@allianzranked/comments
Recovery account steem and all created more than month ago. 45-47 days to be exact so before HF20.
https://steemd.com/@malborooccur
And then the rest: acceptremove, ownaperture, terragreat, breadquick. (If you or someone else wants to examine these more.) :)
But hey, one possible solution is that these are good Steemians accounts who just use these for testing stuff. In a good way. Like ordering a breakin or a hacker to ones company to test security. And by that way making things better.
Not knowing is almost driving me crazy. :D
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Ah, ah, ah! I'm not worried about that. I'll just keep on Steeming. Those spammers are not a problem to me. It's not like they're trying to scam people. As far as I see, they're reblogging other's people posts... and making a few comment here and there. No harm done, I think.
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Most likely they, or someone is just trying to make money quickly with the help of a robot commenting or copypasting few selected sentences.
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This post contained some typos in its mentions that have been corrected in less than a day. Thank you for your quick edit !
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Thank you, you useful bot! :) Copypaste is a bi... bad thing sometimes.
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I don't see as many spam posts in my articles as in the past. I think this was a personal victory for me: I have been trying to covertly make the spammers sick with.. MATHS! Yes. A lot of people are afraid of maths and try to avoid messing with anything more complex than addition. They even multiply by adding many times.
So, in my posts, I have been using secret weapons in the form of words like "formula" "variable" "set" and the dreaded "complexity". At some point I tried "algorithm" but it hurt me as well. We are not ready yet. Now you know, do not look any further than your friend @nyarlathotep for the vanishing of spammers; it's ok steem-people, no need to thank me, I enjoyed this too!
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SHHHH!!! You had to say that out loud! And I had to repeat it! Why?! Now everybody knows this trick!
Thank y.....
Upvoted you. :D
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