Great News - Facebook & Reddit is History.
Last week Steemit stopped using Facebook and Reddit for Steemit registrations and replaced them with Mobile Phone Number Verification. Every new steemit account is now linked to a unique mobile phone number.
You can see how the process works a little further down the page.
Goodbye Facebook & Reddit - Steemit Has Moved Out of Home
Why Change?
One of the main reasons for switching to mobile phones was to reduce the number of multiple spam accounts that we have. It also brings other benefits. Steemit has distanced itself from other social media platforms and told them that we are growing up and don't need them anymore. Can you imagine signing up to facebook with your steemit account? No I can't, so why should we support them?
Whether we like it or not Facebook and Reddit are our competitors and even worse, they censor us which is why it is so, so important that steemit prospers and grows.
There are also people out there that don't have a facebook or reddit account, and/or don't like using it. And there are far more unique mobile phone numbers in the world than social media accounts. In a few countries facebook isn't the most popular social media platform either.
I think it's a positive move on the part of Steemit - what do you think?
Steemit Sign Up Process
Step 1 - Enter Your Email
You will be sent an email with a verification link. Click it and move to step 2.
Step 2 - Enter Your Mobile Phone Number
You will be sent an SMS with a unique code
Step 3 - Enter Your SMS Code
Step 4 - Choose Your Username and Welcome to Steemit
What Do You Think About This Change?
I'm sure that there are pros (and maybe a few cons) that I haven't considered so let me know what you think in the comments section below.
Steemit means so much to so many people and it is so pleasing and encouraging to see so many good people working so hard (in many different ways) to help Steemit grow.
Wife tried to start an account. She's put in her cell and never received a text. When she goes in now and does it
How does she get the code re-sent?
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Same issue here. Very annoying still to sign up. They make stuff so difficult.
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Same issue here. Extremely annoying that this broken UX doesn't get fixed.
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I had closed my FB account about a year or so ago and had to open a temporary one just to have access to Steemit. I like the change.
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The babe!
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Hi @steemtruth, I just stopped back to let you know your post was one of my favourite reads today and I included it in my Steemit Ramble. You can read what I wrote about your post here.
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Compliments from the cat!
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Yeaaaaah! Really Yeaaaah... Upvote!!!
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And here we go.
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Awesome, I like the change. Thinking about making a second account to share my business with steemit and the blockchain.
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It is still open to abuse. For example, people can use free virtual phone numbers. see
https://www.geckoandfly.com/4124/send-and-receive-mms-and-sms-text-messages-to-mobile-phone-online-for-free/
And of course it is easy to get hold of numerous email addresses.
Raising the karma requirements on reddit would have been a better solution, as it is pretty difficult to get a lot of karma on reddit due to the downvote brigades there.
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well that would have eliminated me as a user as I don't use Reddit. I also don't have a mobile phone so that could get interesting too.
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While that's true I'd've never been able to join as I'd never used Reddit before an certainly wouldn't have bothered to spend the time get really good at that site just to join this one. Part of @steemtruth's point is growing beyond the need to be dependent on other sites (ie, competitors at this point). Thanks for the link tho, I'll save it for when I'm ready to open another account ;)
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Just tried to get a friend registered tonight and they don't have a cell. It may have been premature to dump FB registrations.
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This ius a good idea. Thanks for sharing.
A bit of digression: what happens to the spam accounts already created? do the devs kill them, or are they just baked in to the platform?
One one hand, spam accounts are bad for the platform, OTOH, having the devs kill spam accounts can lead to the devs killing controversial accounts
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While this seems to provide a solution for reducing SPAM in the future, it does very little to address the SPAM accounts that currently exist. Is anything going to be done about those? What about existing legitimate accounts...how will they be tied into a unique phone number, or are they grandfathered in "as is?"
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Well, if the account owners have bought SP, then it would be criminal to not allow them to log-on to their accounts and have access to their funds, so, YES, they're grandfathered in...or, bye-bye Steemit.
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Good question and one that I don't have answers to yet.
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I tried to set up an account using the email option and it never sent the email. Heh, pretty tough to verify. Then it wouldn't let me try again because the email address had already been used.
That's a different matter though. Mobile works, but a lot of folks in the world might not have it. And some who do might not have sms. IOW, isn't this a requirement to have a mobile phone?
I think genetic sampling should be implemented. It's even better than fingerprints. ;)
I'm glad they're working on this. It's tough to figure out the best way to implement it. And then there are the company or project names we want to use that we don't want to overlap with our personal accounts. How's that going to work?
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I think it will help to reduce the thousands of 2nd, 3rd, ... accounts created, they are unimportant and useless anyway - thx for the information !
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VERY GOOD
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This post has been linked to from another place on Steem.
Learn more about and upvote to support linkback bot v0.5. Flag this comment if you don't want the bot to continue posting linkbacks for your posts.
Built by @ontofractal
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great
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i read in another post still no so good news for China. the catcha don't work there .
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I talked to the dev team, and they asked me to open a GitHub issue. They will take a look at it.
https://github.com/steemit/steemit.com/issues/515
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Thanks. I'm Singapore and I follow some people from China and saw a post about this.
Good to have this surfaced. Thanks again.
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Welcome :)
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That's a good point. In the short term a vpn will get around that but to scale the guys are going to have to come up with something it seems. I searched for posts on this topic before I wrote it but didn't find one, oh well.
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Hi there, I noted your comment about mobile number stopping spam accounts. Question please. I have one account set up using my mobile number I would like to use this account for writing posts blogs etc for showing my business. I have attempted to set up another account to write fiction stories using a pen name not my real name and using the same mobile number , that was about 3 days ago and haven't heard anything back from steemit where as the first account only took about an hour to get a reply back. Does this mean steemit will approve or not approve my 2nd account I have requested? Your help would be appreciated.
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Hi there, sorry for the slow reply. I haven't been online for a while. The rules may have changed recently but it used to be a case of one mobile number per steemit account.
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Fongo will outfit you with another number for your mobile. You need wifi to use yet callers can leave voice mail and texts when you are not online.
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Great news, thanks for sharing!
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Can I use this to verify my existing account?. and if so, how?
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Not yet but I suspect that you will be able to do so in time.
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Nice to see Steemit "growing up!"
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Two issues on why this way of signing up is flawed
What about if I get a new phone number and someone else tries to create an account on here with my old phone number?
I just created an account and want to create a new account name but it says my phone number has already been used.
What am I supposed to do now!?
Edit: nevermind, created a google voice account and created a new account that way.
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Good! Me and my husband have been trying to start two new accounts but we have both made the same mistake- to enter an email that we have already used for another account here on Steemit (by habit we digit our personal ones...) And now we are stuck in the process and are not sure how we can move on. It would be so goo if Steemit would warn you that the email is already being used when you are about to sign up. Could anyone answer how we could continue to make the two new accounts now? Thank you :) Have a gooood day!
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I'm not sure as I wrote this some time ago and wasn't aware of this issue. Informing users that the email has already been used seems like a very sensible and easy solution to implement. If you use the search function you might be able to find some articles on the topic. Good luck and sorry I don't have more info on this for you.
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Ok, I will try. Thank you for writing
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A friend just tried to register but his phone number was reported to be taken.
I can see several problems with phone numbers as registration requirement.
Adding a requirement for phone numbers, and in lesser degree EMail, without a recovery process seems to be a mayor design flaw top me.
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Hi all ,
I've got a question for this community , probably it is something that i don't know or i ignore but.. what is the sense to have a decentralized network , a blockchain system when steemit ask you for a mobile telephone number to associate with your own personal account ?
Is that a political choiche ? Some security reasons (Local Governament Laws like for energy tokens)
This platform seems amazing for what represent , but why asking for the mobile number?
Thank you.
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