Did Hard Fork 20 have any measurable impact on spam?

themarkymark(81)

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My most infamous bot @badcontent makes a comment whenever someone on my blacklist makes a top-level post (not a comment). This is done to "mark" an author that is on our blacklist for one of the following reasons:

Spam
Plagiarism
Fraud / Scam

Now that Hard Fork 20 has had some time to settle, I was curious how much of an impact it has made. Luckily I have a measurable metric that can give me some insight on that question.

Seeing as @badcontent posts on everyone who is on the blacklist, every time they post, I can use this to get a relative idea of how much spam there is now before and after Hard Fork 20.

Hard Fork 19

Under Hard Fork 19, @badcontent would post 1,800 - 3,450 times a day. 3,450 is about the max you can get with a 20-second comment timeout. No idea what the max would have been if that was not a limitation. The average from the last 60 days prior to Hard Fork 20 was 2,426.

Hard Fork 20

After Hard Fork 20, I now see around 240-615 comments a day with the average coming in a 469 comments a day. While I only have a little over 20 days to average, I think it's fairly accurate number going forward.

Hard Fork 20 has resulted in a 80.6% reduction in spam
_{According to my blacklist}

While there is a lot of spam, plagiarism, and abuse going on, there is significantly less. We still have a lot of work to do, and I hope communities can provide even more support for this at the blockchain level.