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"Communities" development
The "Communities" development should hopefully help to remove spammers from the Steem blockchain, or at least reduce their influence.
Under the "Communities" initiative groups of users will be able to set up their own sub-spaces and will have control over the posting within that space. There will be two types of Community:
- Communities where anyone can post, but where the founders / moderators can subsequently hide posts from view.
- Communities where only certain authors can post.
This could bring a new kind of moderation, under which spammers are simply denied the opportunity to post within a particular group by the founders and moderators of the group.
Alternatively, for more open groups, spammer comments could simply be removed from view. No doubt there will be bots created that remove the list of known spammers as soon as their comments are created. While this brings censorship within the group, the comments will still be visible on the main steemit feed. It's just that no-one will read them there.
Steemcleaners
The current method to remove spammers is to report them to Steemcleaners. The central Steemit team has delegated a huge amount of Steem Power to this team and their role is to educate and ultimately downvote spammers.
Downvoting spammers ensures that they receive no rewards and their comments are hidden from view. This should remove the incentive for future spamming.
Bandwidth restrictions and SP
Spammers who use the Steem account set-up also face having their delegated SP removed which in turn can reduce their available bandwidth to the point that they can no longer post in volume. It will be interesting to see how this defence develops under the new Resource Credit system for managing bandwidth that is to be introduced under HF20.