What I learned about reward farming with a secret Blurt account

For weeks I wrote a daily Blurt post about a patch of sunflowers - under an anonymous alternate account - to learn more about reward farming on this blockchain. After 90 days, I've wrapped up my experiment, and I'm here to present my observations.

( Photos in this post taken mid Sept 2025 on Canon PowerShot SD790 by DRutter )

Method

Using @Khrom's fantastic account-creation tool, I started a new Blurt account, naming it "vegfarmer". This would be my account to test a strategy for farming rewards on Blurt. I intended to run the experiment as long as it took to determine how much BLURT such an account could earn.

Account creation was simple, and soon I had keys to my blog and wallet. Khrom pre-loaded the account with 100 BLURT, which I powered up completely except for 3 BLURT liquid for fees. Khrom then noticed I was low, and sent another 5 liquid BLURT, which was observant and generous of him. (The 105 BLURT has been sent back to Khrom, and he is to be commended for his excellent account-creation tool.)

Using the liquid BLURT, "vegfarmer" followed some prominent blogs, as well as a few randoms. Then added an image and banner (of sunflower plants). Then commented on a contest post and won 5 BLURT, which went directly to pay fees on posts etc. This allowed everything earned to be powered up. The BP started to add up quickly, which caused the "Blurt Powerbot" to start giving a little boost to each post.

On top of that, "vegfarmer" paid the 3% fee to post in the Curators Community, which got his posts noticed by @outofthematrix, who added vegfarmer to the Blurtbooster whitelist. This meant every future post would get the Blurtbooster vote (depending on amount of text and images). So the daily posts were quickly receiving automatic votes from Powerbot and Blurtbooster. My observation was that this is something fairly easy to do, and most new accounts operated by a human achieve this early on.

As for curation, it actually costs MORE to vote than vegfarmer receives for a curation reward, and that would be the case until he had quite a lot more BP. So voting is pretty much pointless from the perspective of trying to earn as many tokens in as little time possible. Creating content and getting automated votes as often as possible seems to be the main tactic for this kind of reward farmer.

The posts

Every day, in addition to whatever else I was doing, I went to the sunflower patch in my back yard with my Canon digital camera. I snapped a few photos, showing the latest changes in the plants. This took about 3 minutes.

Next, I used blurt.blog in a browser on my desktop, to create a quick post on vegfarmer's Blurt blog. To blend in, I wrote in a rough (possibly ESL) style, similar to many found on this blockchain lately. The point of the experiment was not to see if I could become noticed, or popular. It was to investigate, without other users knowing it was an experiment, how someone might unfairly farm payouts from the reward pool.

So my strategy was simple: low-effort low-profile posts, and guaranteed votes from Blurtbooster etc. Writing the posts took 5 or 6 minutes each day. This meant I could run the entire blog with little effort for less than 10 minutes per day. I consider this a low-entry strategy which is obtainable by most internet users in 2025.

https://blurt.blog/@vegfarmer/posts

"These mine beauty photographs ever mine blurt blog. Here mine 5 sun flower plant heads with 2 full open. Close Ups for good view. This photograph I take mine Canon camera today mine family land. Very healthy plant strong leaves . I like this yellow very mush. Soon will form seeds for mine harvest," wrote vegfarmer in his final post.

Side note (this is not important for the experiment, but some may find it important)... while I did not say in my vegfarmer posts "this content is part of an experiment on reward farming" or "my other account is @DRutter", I never said anything that wasn't true. It may have been misleading not to volunteer that information, but it was only done so that the experiment could run without any confounds. Everything I did say in the vegfarmer posts was true.

Observation: You will not make friends, gain followers, or become part of the Blurt community simply by posting here. I posted, day after day after day, and even made sure to comment all over the place... but "vegfarmer" still did not make any friends, did not gain a single followed, and certainly was not part of the community. It was like the posts were invisible, except to votebots like Blurtbooster, even though they were done in the busiest Blurt community (Curator's Community).

Results

In about a week, vegfarmer's daily posts were already bringing in about 150 BLURT (about $0.35 to $0.40) each. This could be repeated every 24 hours (any sooner meant less rewards from the votebots). I did not obtain any followers, but who needs followers as a farmer, when you've got Blurtbooster?

Observation: I don't have exact figures, but Blurtbooster is responsible for at least 2/3 of vegfarmer's total rewards. It's definitely a reward farmer's dream.

After six weeks of nonstop posting - a total of 280 photographs! - the pattern was not changing at all. Each post made the same as the one before it, week after week. I could do 1 every 24 hours without losing efficiency.

So a 10 minute low-effort post can generate a ~150 BLURT payout.

But remember...

Just because it says you earned $1 doesn't meant you really earned $1!

You have to pay your beneficiaries (such as 3% to the community you posted in, 10% to BlurtMedia, etc)... then you have to surrender another 50% to the curators (in this case the votebots)... on top of any blockchain fees to earn and accept the payout.

So when it says $1, you might end up with 30 cents into your pocket. Big payouts that say $8 really mean about $3 for you. And so on.

That said, vegfarmer was able to pull in 150 BLURT per day, which worked out to 4500 BLURT per month. At current price (0.0025 USD) that's $11.25 USD per month, working 10 minutes a day.

The proof is in the puddling, anyway. Vegfarmer's wallet has 2700 BLURT ($6.6 USD), and it was earned over 44 posts, meaning he pocketed about 61 BLURT (15 cents) per post.

Could someone do several farming blogs? Sure they could. It's not even a lot harder than doing 1 blog, actually. When the process is automated further, I bet you could easily pump out 10 of these blogs in just 1 hour of work daily. (Ex: Using what I see around me, I could have done a sunflower blog, an apple tree blog, an herbs blog, an anthill blog, a lawn blog, a weather blog, a compost blog, a wildlife blog, a garden blog, and a pet blog. Snap snap, type type, click click.)

That would bring in $112.50 USD per month (working 1 hour a day). It's not huge, but in some economies that's enough to put food on the table. I wouldn't be surprised if this is already happening here on Blurt. It may explain some of the really low-quality junk posts that litter the blockchain, you know, the ones that look auto-generated with a random snapshot of some trees, people, buildings etc. And when you go to the blog, they've got almost no followers, but a daily post that's almost identical to the previous one. Farming accounts. They slowly earn rewards and then funnel them into some central wallet later. Generally, the BLURT is sold into the market.

What will happen to vegfarmer's rewards?

After a full powerdown, vegfarmer has 2693.336 BLURT liquid (6.6 USD). After reimbursing Khrom the 105, there's 2588.273 left. I have a plan for it...

Under my regular (drutter) account, I will soon be posting another "Blurt Airdrop" - Blurt Warriors edition!

Instead of keeping vegfarmers rewards, I'm going to return them to the community, by adding them to the Blurt Airdrop prize pool.

So the initial costs to open the account were repaid, and the payouts are being returned to the general Blurt community. Any insights generated are a nice bonus.

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Farming on the Blurt blockchain

Content farming versus curation farming?

The type of reward farming vegfarmer was doing is content farming. Hallmarks:

• low quality
• flower snapshots
• copypasted
• auto-generated / chatbot material
• multiple translations

Result: lots of low-effort content generated regularly.

Tactics used:

• post in communities to quickly boost reach for a 3% fee
• spam tags
• routine posting (usually every 18 to 24 hours)
• get on Blurtbooster UBI whitelist
• comment on popular posts to increase visibility and seem to be a team player

The result is lots of small post reward payouts, but no curation rewards. The BLURT is usually withdrawn to an exchange and sold.

Analysis

Going into this, I believed this was a huge problem, and a potential threat to the entire project. Spam can be a defining issue for many platforms, and we're certainly inviting it by dishing out free automatic votes for any account claiming to be operated by a human. And yet, I'm now realizing this type of farming isn't really that big a deal. The other type (curation farming) is far more damaging to the Blurt community and tokenomics.

In fact, these low-quality content farming strategies are often just considered a (low quality) form of "grinding"... slowly eeking out some profit with regular content. These kinds of farmers generally stay within the rules, and their conduct isn't all that far outside accepted norms. They're often not contributing much, and they're usually selling their proceeds, but through fees they're basically paying their own way, and it's not all that profitable. Granted, it's low-entry (doesn't cost anything or need any special equipment/software to get started). But unless you're really dedicated, and spend a lot of time on it, you're not going to make enough to pay the rent - even in countries where a dollar goes a long way. And anyone running dozens of farming accounts here is bound to get noticed. I no longer see this kind of farming as the worst kind.

Besides... there's nothing we can really do about it, anyway. Low-effort content farmers are gonna farm. One man's trash is another man's 100% upvote.

Blurt's reward farming problem isn't about bad content, it's about bad curation.

Fundamentally, what do curators do?

The curator's role is to pay the blockchain's content creators. They decide who gets paid, and how much. No curation, no economy, no blockchain.

Each curator's stake (share of total BP) determines the magnitude of that role. The more you have invested here, the bigger your responsibility to curate (pay the content creators) properly.

If you're dishing out your share of the reward pool on content merely because you are that content's creator, you're de facto embezzling funds you were tasked with distributing fairly. Especially if that content is something you created with little effort, such as a banal comment. But that tactic is becoming incredibly common here lately, with users voting not only on their own posts, but routinely on their own comments (or within a circle-jerk).

We have a Blurt cofounder, a few witnesses, and supposed pillars of the community doing heavy-duty nonstop curation farming, completely unbalancing our economics. This prevents smaller and newer accounts from having any hope of gaining any traction and earning any money, unless they go the route of farming their content for UBI votes. It also fills up Trending and Hot with nonsense posts, making Blurt look bad to prospective users. And it demoralizes all the users who work hard and operate within accepted norms, only to see others with large stakes voting on all their own (or their alternate accounts) stuff, monopolizing the reward pool for their own growth. This tactic pays, and it pays well. More and more Blurt users, and even entire frontends, have become farmers in the last few months.

Curation farming is a far bigger threat to Blurt's sustainability and longterm growth than spammy low-effort posts could ever be.

Case in point? Look at Steem. It has become a wasteland of junk content, ruled over by massive bloated farming operations. If you're not a curation farmer, you're not making anything on Steem. Blurt is headed more and more in that direction. Our curation farming problem is holding us back, and it's getting worse all the time. The more who start doing it, the more damage to the normal economy here, and the more who are driven to do it - a vicious cycle.

I would know about this stuff. I have 1.4m BLURT, which when powered up, is about 0.5% of all BP. I recently powered down, after being one of the biggest Blurt curators for years. Rarely did I turn the votes upon my own comments. Nor did I have my wife @MediKatie post lots of low-effort comments so that I could farm both the content and curation rewards from them all. And I don't have any secret accounts (other than @vegfarmer) to be used for such purposes. I know several people here who do stuff like that, but I'm not one of them.

I felt the temptation to do it, especially once I had invested/earned my way to a decent stake. After all, it's hard for people to stop you. You can keep it hidden. Or, you can become well known and respected, and dish out some votes to those who keep quiet about your sins... you won't be called out even if you 100% upvote your own 5-word comment right after making it. And if you ARE called out? Oh well, what is anyone gonna do about it? Downvote you? Make a post about you and tell everybody not to support you? Big deal, you don't need anyone else's vote... you've got your own!

Blurt's problem is curation farming, not content farming like @vegfarmer's low-quality sunflower blog.

Solutions?

The problem doesn't have any easy fixes. Additionally, there's very little impetus to solve the problem, because many large BLURT holders (insiders, witnesses, community veterans, etc) benefit from it continuing.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em? I suppose a lot of people have already come to that conclusion. Myself, I won't be participating in curation farming. In fact, it's one reason why it is becoming less and less likely I'll ever power up my 1,400,000 BLURT again.

Conclusion

With a brand new secret account, over 90 days, I experimented with content reward farming on Blurt. By getting automatic Blurtbooster votes and posting once daily, even without gaining any followers, I was able to generate about 150 BLURT per low-effort post. By automating the process, one person could bring in at least $100 USD per month, working about an hour per day. This may explain some of the spam posts and accounts on our blockchain. But this problem pales in comparison to curation reward farming, using stake to unfairly allocate the reward pool to oneself and/or friendly parties. This tactic unbalances the platform's economy, discourages new users, and drives content quality downward. Unfortunately, because it is often used by the platform's most powerful, there is little effort being made to raise awareness of the problem, let alone take steps to resolve it. My research leads me to conclude that content farming low-effort Blurt posts for small payouts is a more visible but ultimately less destructive issue. All forms of reward farming should continue to be monitored and discussed.

DRutter