The Spam Animations

Spam!! We might hate it but it is a sign of Steemit's success that we are attracting so much of it. Today I have been flagging some right shady nonsense and it reminded me of my spam animations.

There was always a little spam on steemit but it wasn't until the user numbers really started to spike three or four months ago that it started to become a noticeable issue.

My first animation around this was a simple one. Born of the frustration that users were feeling from the people who would approach them in chat or in the comments on their post and just dumping a link and demanding an upvote, follow and a resteem.

Gradually new users guilty of this started to get the idea and it died down a little. Still happens occasionally but at least it is not every five seconds.

My next, possibly overused favourite of the bunch was Nice Post. A new breed of spammers had arrived. With the arrival of hardfork 19 votes were worth much more than before. Spammers would randomly comment one or two word comments hoping for comment votes.

Ah, I still love that one.

Spammers are clever though. Where money is involved they will work tirelessly to game the system. Soon it was uncovered that some users were posting random numbers as comments on old posts and then upvoting these with their full power for the mega bucks. I thought this animation was quite apt.

Especially when people started to get caught a lot of them claimed they were innocent and didn't think there was anything wrong with it. Ah, you gotta love it.

Finally, I was inspired when people wrote of the reward pool being humped by bots. I thought it would be good to bring an old character the Steem Prince back into the fray. With a new weapon. The Steem Hammer!!

I use an android app on my phone called Flipaclip to create my animations. If you fancy it, try it out. It's cool making them but it takes an awfully long time! Feel free to ask me any questions on it though. I am here to help.