Steemit's "Downvote Mosquitoes:" Just How MANY Accounts Can One Person Create?

Greetings good people of WOX and Greater Steemlandia!

I was going to write about something totally different, and then I noticed that I had once again been visited by a couple of members of Steemit's "swarm" of what I have come to call "Downvote Mosquitoes."

Screen shot from SteemWorld.org, @steemchiller's excellent helper app

Chances are that you have been visited by these nuisance mongers, as well. They have been around for a while. They pretty much hit everyone.

Like real-life mosquitoes, they are really more annoying than an outright hazard.

You see, they are tiny and cannot actually hurt your payout, nor can they affect your reputation.

They are all Rep. 25 accounts voting with 10%, with an impact of 0.000

Let's take a closer look at one of them:

As you can see from the next screen shot, they only exist to do ONE thing: randomly scatter 10% downvotes everywhere.

Those of us who have been around here for a long time know that they are meaningless and harmless. But they certainly ARE annoying!

They have virtually no history, they have no owned SP, they don't post, they don't comment and they are very hard to track. All they have (sometimes) to their credit is the initial account creation delegation from @steem.

If you're really into poking around in stuff like this, I encourage you to use a blockchain viewer like SteemD. and SteemWorld.org.

There is a fairly active effort going to remove these tiny delegations, thereby removing what few resource credits they have... but it's an endless task.

They used to be easier to find and track because they were programmed to vote for specific witnesses who would send a 0.001 Steem "thank you memo" to anyone supporting them, and all these tiny amounts of Steem would be automatically transferred to the "head of the snake," sometimes using several "jumps" to disguise their path.

The Head of the Snake

Of course, I'm "special!" Occasionally, I get a visit from the head of the snake:

It's a special privilege I "earned" for being one of the early people to tell this individual to pi$$ off!

CLEARLY, someone has a major axe to grind!

Now you might be wondering....

Can't Something Be DONE?

Not really. Not exactly. Not effectively.

The same mechanism that makes Steemit somewhat "censorship resistant" also protects this kind of activity, to some extent. It's one thing to alter the base code to "write out" a few specific accounts, quite another to identify and then mute tens of thousands of accounts.

Besides... how do you "mute" someone who never SAYS anything?

The whole thing is run as an automated botnet with possibly tens of thousands of these tiny "mosquito" accounts.

The only thing that can be "done" is what I am doing here... PUBLICIZING what you're seeing, and showing that it's ultimately harmless, even if annoying.

You're better off learning to just Zen with it...

The only other thing that can be done is for Steem to manually remove the tiny delegations, rendering the accounts "inert" because they have no resource credits. Even so, the sheer number of these makes that a gargantuan task and probably not how @steemit's staff best can spend their time.

An occasional recurring explanation on the official @steemitblog might be a more worthwhile way to address the issue.

But that's not my call to make.

Smooth sailing?

Pieces of History: WHY Does This Even Exist???

Well, I personally only have some of the pieces, gathered in my 4 1/2 years here.

Ultimately, "someone" didn't like being downvoted for spamming, citing that "it's permitted by the base code" and then created a retaliatory campaign... and was evidently angry enough to set all this up.

The purpose really was never to take away legitimate poster's rewards; it was to discourage and demoralize newcomers who wouldn't understand why they were suddenly being downvoted. Early incarnations of the "mosquito swarm" would focus heavily on low reputation new accounts... some poor souls would make their first post here and get 10-15 tiny downvotes, naturally getting quite upset!

On the greater scale — in the mind of this individual — that would "cause Steemit to fail."

Those of us who are still here know that's not how things work...

So anyway...

My "thoughtful Sunday post" instead turned into sharing a bit of Steemit "history."

I'll return to my "regularly scheduled programming" tomorrow!

Thanks for reading, and have a great week ahead!

How about YOU? Have you been visited by the "Downvote Mosquitoes?" Do you know anything else about their background that I might have missed here? Do 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 20210822 22:20 PDT
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