Unlike many — who have no doubt left permanently for "sunnier" locales, I do still occasionally check the feed of "new posts" here on Steem.
Sadly, I find myself in agreement with @adsup, who wrote a post last week lamenting that the "Recent" feed has become so spammy it's for all intents and purposes unusable.
I mean, what IS this?
Simple answer is, of course: "SPAM."
The more extensive answer is that it's a particularly pervasive form of webspam, in which some person actually believes they have been sold a "money making program" that allows them to earn commissions for referring people to online Pay-per-View sporting events.
And it's not even just SPAM, it's actually "RE"-SPAM, in which someone is spamming secondary and even tertiary level garbage.
By the time wee see it here, it has been "diluted" to the point where the average "exposure" to a random web user is probably on the order of 0.00001 cents.
Yet, some naive fool somewhere actually believes they are "making money online" by doing this.
Regardless...
Nevermind what it is... the fact that it is running rampant in our community to the point that new content discovery is almost impossible is basically hurting everybody!
I'm less and less inclined to wade through pages of this stuff, merely in service of trying to find one or two interesting newcomers to read. And if that's my reaction... why would someone want to join Steem, as a viable content creator?
Of course, none of this is new to me. I've seen... probably dozens... of formerly very nice blogging communities effectively TAKEN DOWN by unpoliced spam, in the course of the past 20 years or so.
The "Freedom Thing"
People who are hot-to-trot on the whole immutability and censorship resistance of blockchains are always quick to shove away any ideas that "restricts" people's freedom of expression.
Sadly, humanity keeps showing us that giving people absolute freedom results in chaos and decay... we'd like to think it wouldn't, but the level of freedom those with anarchist leanings propose are typically predicated on a level of intelligence and self-awareness that's simply not prevalent in the broader population!
Just like "Austrian Economics" is a wonderful concept, as long as it remains contained within the sheltered bubbles of academic think tanks. But it breaks down in the world of self-involved "Joe Sixpacks" who don't give a flying flip about anyone or anything aside from their own self-gratification at others' expense.
'Nuff said...
Anyway, it makes me sad to see this crap... and I am starting to genuinely fear for the future of Steem...
Thanks for reading, and hope you're having a great weekend!
What do YOU think? Have you noticed this growing type of SPAM? Do you think something should be done about it? If so, what? Can something be done "at the code level" to eliminate it? As always, comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!
(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20201003 18:51 PDT
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Seeing that screenshot that reminds me some of ex-users who left, they produced numerous posts and because of their high SP upvoted themselves with high votes, them put up to 40 comments with such spam on their own posts and upvoted them too. I do not know if you were around the time when Steem split and such things were very common. Nevertheless, it is a shame but Spam, abuse, " milking" and vote-farming, is and will be there. There should be some mechanism that will control it and prevent them. I still think that such group like Steemcleaners is very important with their discord and appeal channel. I agree with few users above when you look around adn just visit different tag adn look at new acocunts it is sometimes very frustrating. The whole idea of blogging and sharing something with others, commenting and making friends with the people with the same opinion is so rare nowadays. I do not know if anything could be changed, it is people who should wish to be changed in first instance. Thank you for being around it is always a pleasure to read your posts and your comments :)
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Greed is a very common — and extremely destructive — problem on sites that pay contributors for content... and that pre-dates the blockchain social format by almost 20 years. We dealt with similar abuse issues on Epinions in 1999... and it has figured prominently on pretty much every site where I have published.
Yes, I was around at the time of the split, and there were just a lot of angry and frustrated people behaving like spoiled children... it was really an embarrassment... mostly to themselves.
The challenge, of course, is finding the balance between the liberty/freedom people so prize in these decentralized venues, and simply having rules and enforcing them. The point is that most people are simply not ready to manage freedom responsibly. Unfortunately, the bad behavior of a few tends to drive away the legitimate users who are behaving appropriately.
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I only go straight to my communities or my follow feed, so I rarely see anything I would call spam. It is possible to avoid entirely, although I have only pulled that off by chance. What do I know? I'm a little old lady trying to save the world on social media.
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This is what I do but it is something interested new persons can't do. They see the spam and will never sign up... :-(
Besides they see all this pushed abuse posed on the trending pages and... will never sign up...
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I did see something from Steemit this week that their engineering team is working on the spam problem, so hopefully it's just temporary, but I agree with the points here. The trending page has always been off-putting for new users, and it is especially so now.
I actually think that maybe "new" should be deemphasized on the site. I mean, I wouldn't even dream of trying to look at every single facebook post or twitter post or even medium blog article. In a way, "new" is sort-of an acknowledgement that we're small enough scale that it's even possible to think about seeing everything.
Maybe condenser should enhance search and filtering capabilities and give people without community subscriptions access to a view of new posts in certain, "white listed" communities, and at the same time, put "new" somewhere where you have to look really hard to find it.
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As an ex-newbie, I would have never thought to do that. I think we need a Hive Light version, an introductory side chain, that one can switch over to the big time from once one has gotten at least some of the lingo down and feels ready for more. It's way too confusing at first. Idk why I stayed.
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To understand the technical jargon, many helpful users who continue to see the whole construct here as a joint product would suffice. In some communities, support in the labyrinth of the jungle is very important. But many, many others unfortunately only see their own profit, do not look left or right. Maybe out of fear of having to share pool coins?!
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Oh, that is a very good news!
I'm still a bit disappointed that there are no official announcements for such a thing and that you have to look for such information from comments, nevertheless: very good news!
I like to look at "new" under certain hashtags very much, but you're right: for the whole platform this function is nonsensical.
Maybe "trending" or even a "whitelisting" to be developed should be structured differently. Since we know about the many possibilities of abuse, we should work on it that not the high rewards are the "success" that catapult a post into trending. What about comments? For example, I don't get very high rewards, but over 50 comments (excluding bots) in one of my recent articles somehow show that the post is interesting for many and encourages conversation.This is worth much more than "questionable" Steem through buying votes, delegation service, begging...
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I like the idea of some kind of metric that could assign an objective "value" to a post... a ranking based on engagement, number of comments, number (not "value") of upvotes by non-bots, maybe even article length; perhaps a system that even disregards "purchased" votes.
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I'm glad to hear they are working on something @remlaps!
Trending is sort of meaningless I find. It's easy to say "I don't LOOK at Trending!" but it doesn't make sense in a broader context because it's the default view for someone who's checking out the site for the first time and doesn't yet have an account. And from that perspective, it's not very attractive to a potential new member.
I don't know if you're familiar with the new LeoFinance condenser, which was built from the group up, and does NOT just look like a Steem/Hive wraparound anymore... the most featured real estate on the landing page does to manually hand curated posts of high quality, below that there is one "trending" stream and one "recent" stream.
I think it's a good model.
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I agree about trending, and about spam reduction.
I'm not familiar with recent updates on the LeoFinance web site. I was one of the people whose stake got swiped by the hive witnesses when they forked-off, so I haven't been keeping up with anything that migrated over there. I do remember that the LeoFinance developers were doing a lot of good things with that interface when they were here on Steem, though, so what you say makes sense, and it sounds like a really good first-impression for new users. I saw on Twitter that the token has been doing well, too.
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In general, I manage to avoid it by going to my friends feed, or my community feed as you do. I guess I'm just sad because part of me is an "Old Steemian" remembering the days (2017) where I'd spend a good bit of time perusing the new posts feed to discover cool new people I'd never read before....
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Thanks for sharing I've seen them spammers there's just so many of them
The problem really needs to get sorted it don't look good
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It definitely does need to get sorted, if Steem is to have any kind of growth in its future. Otherwise, we'll just be the same 20 people sitting here, lamenting that things aren't "better!"
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Yes hopefully we can come together and sort out the problem but it's definitely going to be very hard thanks for replying 🤝 if you have a Instagram account feel free to contact me at @kgakakillerg
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