Preface
Steemit is all about engagement with the community. So with that prelude, followers play a vital role in one’s journey on steemit. Normally people take alot of pride when their number of following reach to a milestone like 100, 500, 1000 so on and so forth. With the evolution of steemit, a lot of bots have come into play whose primary job is to start following regular steemit users to advertise or worse for phishing scams.
A steemit user has full control over the list of people he / she is following, however there is a growing need to be able to have same controls over one’s followers.
Steemit users are finding it difficult to grasp that even with 500 followers, they are still not visible on platform. This is majorly because of alot of bots / dead accounts following them.
Solution / Proposal
In order to be able to get a true picture of number of people following ones account, the option to “remove” dead accounts / bot accounts is mendatory.
The option of forcebly removing someone from following you will help discourage the practice of creating spam / bot accounts.
Furthermore, steemit users can well organize their followers list to keep better track of those who actively participate in their blogs.
Examples / GUI design prototype
Foregone in view, proposed changes can be incorporated in steemit condenser as below:-
Fig 1 : Clicking the “Followers” option will reveal followers in alphabetical order
Fig 2 : An option of “Remove” follower would be displayed against each follower’s username
Benefits of said proposal
The advantages from adding this feature to platform will be threepronged :-
Decluttering of followers by discarding dead / bot accounts
Discouragement of creation of bot accounts
More visibility of active followers, which in turn shall yield further fruitful engagement on platform.
I sincerely hope that devs would be able to incorporate such a basic feature onto platform to further refine the experience of engagement for all steemit users.
Thank you
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Indeed. I agree.
There is no point of increasing the number of followers if you can't keep track all of them. This way you will invite unwanted dead accounts and phishers.
You can simply flag the unwanted comments on your posts, and the phishers will remove themselves from your wall.
I have a question though, for minnows like myself doesn't having many followers help in the visibility of my post ?
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No it doesnt.. having many followers has nothing to do with visibility. Actually when people say that they have 500 followers, they say that under thr assumption that maximum of those are active followers who contribute towards his blog by upvoting and commenting.. today, you can create 1000 accounts and tell them all to follow you. Won’t help with the visibility though..
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totally agree
what is the fun of having tons of followers when they don't engage, don't contribute
i would prefer 10 interested followers over these 1000 bot acounts
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Absolutely true
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I agree and good observation. I see a lot of them with lots of followers but still struggling with visits on their posts. It's a great idea to declutter.
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Yes you are right
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I agree, sir. And thank you so much for sharing this information to everyone here. Upvoted and resteemed for all my followers and readers' information. Many are being victimized by these scammers and hackers and we really need to be very careful. God bless and Happy Easter po :-)
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Thank you po.. and happy easter to you too and to ypur nanay.. :)
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I agree. This would be very helpful. To trim out the deadwood would make my blog a lot easier to manage!
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That's a good advice.
Number of followers doesn't matter right now. There are people with 10k followers and 25 rep here
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You are spot on
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Thanks for diverting our attention towards bots who are pishing scammers in the hide of followers. Every one love followers but only active followers should be in your list. keep sharing @jbn
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It's good to have a control on followers. But not necessary because pishing bots can find from many ways. I have noticed many users or bots who are not following me but sometimes comments pishing.
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True but its good to at least stop them in one way if not all..
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I'd really like to be able to remove followers. I don't know what the point of those accounts following me is as they never do anything. Maybe then they can start a "resteem service" if those people follow them back, but they don't provide value.
Maybe utopian can look into my idea for blocking incoming wallet transactions from spammers. That would be nice too! :)
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Yes i totally agree with you. And your idea incoming transactions by spammers are absolutely spot on.. i would love to read it.. can you provide me the link to your contribution?
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Sure, I didn't want to just drop links without checking with you first.
I believe the infrastructure for this is already in place.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@themanwithnoname/wallet-fix-stop-the-scams-spam
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Wonderful. You were manage to cover all the basis and i couldnt agree with you more. sorry that the post is 9 days old so i cant upvote it.. but i gotta ask that you should have posted it in utopian. You would have got a healthy upvote with it..
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Thanks, I'm glad that it makes sense. I didn't know what the requirements were for posting in Utopian. I was thinking about trying to make a mockup and then re-posting.
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I agree with you 100% just recently i crossed the landmark of 100 followers, still when i post new post hardly there are any views of post irrespective of how good my post is. Without opening any post, how can we judge it ?
Do you have any ratio as out of 100 or 1000, how much are real accounts ?? Just idea ?
Last but not least, this is great idea to put this simple button but lots of bots are marketing for resteem highlighting followers, they wont use that button :)
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No brother, there is no specific ratio for real vs bot spam accounts but i can tell you one thing. Real active accounts are always less than 50% of total following.. it is pertinent to note that there are a lot of dead accounts too (which to be fair i deem as useless followers), this is alarming, really..
And this feature will help clear out clutter...
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Noted with thanks bro, hope someone listen to you and make that remove button soon :) My followers move from 100 to 110 in couple of days but i am no more exited about it :(
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Apparently it is not a “desired” solution according to utopian moderators. Infact they have straightaway failed to register this nuisance as a problem in the first place. May be they have some stake in it. I wouldnt be surprised if alot of those spam bots are connected to @utopian-io moderators or some of the whales.
Fear not, utopian rewards open source contributions but i am not in it for the rewards.. i will make sure that this goes upwards to the devs with or without utopian’s involvement..
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Noted with thanks, however i am very unfamiliar with @utopian-io moderators. Who are they ? Do i need to study about them as they are relevant to Steemit ? thank you for your help
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Your contribution cannot be approved because it does not follow the Utopian Rules.
Your suggestion is considered as trivial because it does not add extensive value to enhance the steemit platform. Suggestions of value needs to be extensive with greater information and explanation for the project owner.
You are advised to always suggest things that will most probably have great impact on the project. Example of good contributions can be found here: https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@mattniblock/6bzrry-steemit-app-design-wireframes
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
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I respectfully disagree. This is not my first time in utopian and it is safe to say that utopian “rewards” have rather been disappointing considering the level of contribution everyone makes on the platform.
You, mentioning that my contribution is trivial is absolutely unjustified and to be quite frank, a little rude.
Because i do not see steemit stopping spamming bots from following steemit users and this is becoming a huge nuisance. Number of followers is significant to a person’s experience and blog quality on steemit and unfortunately due to huge spam / bot accounts, this criteria of measuring someone’s experience or quality of blog on steemit is not valid anymore.
Sometimes, solutions to the biggest problems are small. Huge amounts of bugs and errors are removed from a software just by adding a line of code or removing one. I would’t call those solutions trivial.
I dont contribute towards utopian for rewards. If i wanted to, i can cleverly post 3 contributions a week by recommending suggestions in open source programs by merely adding / editing few lines in the code (which i know alot of people are doing and skimming rewards from utopian).
If you consider this contribution as trivial then you could have approved this contribution with a minimum reward to address your concern of me not making a “huge” post on it.
This contribution, by the way, adds almost the same amount of value (if not more) to the platform in comparsion to you suggesting a “collage” on steepshot by adding a collage button on right top corner of steepshot page. No matter how long you have tried to make it by explaining to the “people of social media” that what a collage is, still the contribution was about just one line and that is to add “collage” on steepshot..
Anyways, this is unbecoming of a utopian moderator to tell someone that their contribution is trivial and cannot be accepted because it wasn’t lengthy to read.
Cheers. I would be contacting @elear on discord to clear this thing out because as per my understanding as an engineer and as a steemit user, i would never rule out someone’s idea just because they did not make a 3 page post about it and rather successfully explained the idea on 1 page.
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@jbn, thank you for your long explanation. We try our best to review each contribution and put much thought and care into each one when we do the review. If you feel this is not a fair review, you can always contact my supervisor on discord. Presently @knowledges is the suggestion supervisor. If I had been too hard on the review, I apologise. My supervisor with more experience can give you further help here.
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Well.. @knowledges has failed to consider this “dead accounts / spam bot accounts” issue even an issue so we didn’t get to the part where the solution is discussed.. congratulations, you retain..
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Great information thanks for this valuable post.
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Thank you
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I like you, bot. Like me back.
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Hahahaha
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Thats not misspelling, thats a typo.. but you are a bot. That means u have no engagement level with human steemit users, so here is a flag...
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Ha ha ha, that was highly amusing to me. I enjoyed your writing. LOL
How'd you even get that account following you? Sometimes you have to sign up and then they follow. This one just found you on its own?
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This is the first time i have encountered this bot. And looking at its reputation score, i don’t think people are liking it that much.. :D
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