Yikes! That's a garish and ugly banner picture. But do you know what else is garish and ugly? Comment spam.

It happened again. How many times will I have to see comments like this?

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"Nice post."

"Vote for vote?"

"Very helpful your information. Now upvote mine."

"Hello dear, I follow you, now you follow?"

"How Should the Steemit Community Deal with Comment Spam is a very good topic"

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I could give a million more examples, but they're all basically the same:

They are useless, nothing comments that are always begging for an upvote.

Yes, I said "always." Whether these users explicitly ask for a vote or not is irrelevant. It's what they're all looking for. They comment on my blog in the hope that I'll give them a penny or two and they usually have the audacity to do so without even voting on my post.

How Should the Community Deal with This?

Let me tell you a bit about my personal history of dealing with spammers. I have three methods, and SPOILER ALERT, methods 1 and 2 don't work very well.

Method 1: Ignore Them

This was my original modus operandi. I wouldn't give them an upvote and I wouldn't give them any attention. I liked to imagine them writing their stupid little comments and dreaming of a big payday, only to have me crush their dreams.

You don't mind me reusing my old animations, do you?

The problem with this method is that I'm not the spammers only source of potential income. They spam all over the place. And guess what! Someone out there rewards them for it. They must. Otherwise the spammers would have given up by now.

Method 1 doesn't work so long as there are any Steemians out there who continue to upvote garbage posts and garbage comments. So stop it. Don't reward them.

Method 2: Mess with Them

When ignoring them didn't seem to make them go away, I decided to start messing with them and shaming them for daring to pollute my comment feed with such rubbish.

Ladies and gentlemen, you're in for a treat. Presented as one collection for the very first time is a selection of Seth Tomlinson's recent spammers and his responses!

What's up with that last one? What even are some of those words and why is that exact message being shared by different spammers? Do they have a club where they get together to exchange their terrible ideas for making money on Steemit?

Messing with the spammers is fun. But here's why it doesn't work: the spammers don't stick around to read the replies. I don't think any of them ever respond to my comments. That's because they are just as disinterested in that conversation as they were in the blog post that they were commenting on. They're only interested in suckering other Steemians into wasting some of their voting power on their blather.

Method 3: The Flag

The dreaded flag. The thing I can so rarely bring myself to use on Steemit...

I hate flagging. I hate using my voting power to against someone else. I try to look at it as a last resort, but sometimes it is necessary.

Methods 1 and 2 haven't works. Maybe Method 3 will.

As a community, if we don't like certain behaviour on the platform, we shouldn't just ignore it. We should de-incentivize it. We should hit them where it hurts: their wallet and their reputation.

By flagging, we can take away their post rewards. If they continue behaving this way, they will continue getting flagged until their reputation will be down in the dirt. I'll probably still mess with the spammers too... because it's fun.

I love Steemit and I want it to be a good place. In order to keep it that we, we have to be vigilant. I'm no longer going to tolerate shitty, money-grabbing behaviour on my blog. If you leave a worthless comment, you WILL be flagged.

From now on, all of my posts will end with this graphic to serve as a warning to spammers:

I doubt the graphic will make much of a difference since the spammers tend not to read the posts, but it's worth a shot. Feel free to steal it and use it on your own blog.

Let's clean up Steemit!

~Seth

P.S. Not all short comments are worthless. Don't be afraid to leave simple words of encouragement. I'll try to be a fair judge. It's usually easy to tell the spam apart from the genuine posts. If you're a regular follower and commenter on my blog, I will certainly recognize you and won't punish you for telling my in few words that you liked my art or my writing.