The New Bot Commenters on Steemit: Fuck You!

dek(62)

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Some of you come from Wordpress, where this type of spam is most prevalent - pointless, general comments, linking to a spam site. They are handwritten, often use poor English, and are automatically posted by bots across the net. The bot creators are either from Eastern Europe or most commonly Asia, and India in particular.

I see the spam bot creators have adapted their database of polite but stupid comments for use on Steemit. Every time I post a photo, I get several comments of the type:

General comment, not having anything to do with my post content, myusername.

The last couple of examples, under my photo collection from the first week of July:

I just joined but i was wondering is there any referral system in place here on steemit? @dek

The post is very interesting. thanks for sharing @dek

Of course, there are others, which don't follow the same format, but are just as bad. You can also spot them easily, by checking whether the commenter has upvoted the article they claim they've liked so much - bots don't upvote user content (at least, at the moment). They are also low level accounts, as they are still new on Steemit and don't post much (if anything).

So what's the deal with these bots?

Well, many authors, including myself, upvote comments under their articles, as a way of saying "thank you for taking the time to post a comment under my publication, given that there are hundreds of other posts posted every second on Steemit." This results in thousands of clueless authors rewarding bots for crappy comments, even though no one has read their article. Of course, the bot creators make a pretty penny.

So my request to the (still sane part of the) Steemit community:

Do not upvote comments, which don't reference your content!

If you see a comment "That's a great post!" or "More of this, please!", well fuck you bot! Next time ask your programmer to read my content first!