RE: Spammers and Conspiracy Theories
If creating the account is as easy as it was before (or maybe even easier?) and pumping money to the account to get more SP ans RC, how is that exactly reducing other than those spammers who don't want / can't invest money to Steemit?
Most users don't have the SP needed to create even one free account, especially spammers who tend to have almost no SP.
New accounts start with 0 voting power, so they cannot be used to farm. They also have so low RC they can only post 3 comments every 5 days. So they can't spam post/comment.
They will need to power up to do more than that, and most spammers are powering down and selling.
It's not perfect, it never will be. Spam will always exist, but it has reduced the amount of spam considerably. Here's an example.
I have a bot called @badcontent, that posts a comment whenever someone on my blacklist makes a new post. Under HF19 it would post 2700-3500 comments a day. 3500 is around the max limit due to the 20 second delay, so it could have actually been much higher than 3500 a day.
Under HF20, the bot is only posting 200-500 comments a day. That's a huge difference.
Thank you for extremely fast comment! :)
I agree, there's no one solution that would make things perfect. And I also agree that spam has reduced. I sure do love numbers and charts and believe in them. :) And I'm glad that spammers are powering down, instead of trying harder. So this was one of the good things in HF20.
But when those spammers that are here only for the money and maybe throw few phishing links here and there, are mostly gone, are those also who have the money, lots and lots of it? Their plans might be something else than making more money. Information war for instance.
I'm not saying that HF20 should have fixed all kind of spammers. This is just my way of thinking further. And creating wild theories.
And I would really like to know the purpose and perhaps also origin of those few spammers that I encountered on my old post. I'd like to ask them: why?