Dear Blurtians, today we are going to discuss a unpleasant topic, it's far from the subjects that I like to discuss but I think a little prevention is sometimes necessary.
Before starting, I want to clarify that I am far from being a professional curator, nor necessarily a very good curator, when I wander on the Blurt blockchain it's to relax, read and see things on subjects that speak to me. For my curation with my account and that of @beblurt I set no particular rules except to have a good time without stressing myself out (that I reserve for when I am doing development).
Sometimes I can be tricked, these are unfortunately things that happen because there will always be people trying to abuse the system. This morning, this was almost the case before I changed my mind and did a little investigation. Having seen that some curation groups as well as the curation bots @ctime, @blurtbooster were tricked I thought an explanation post on their way of proceeding could interest the curators such as @r2cornell @mariuszkarowski @techclub @sagarkothari88 @blurtlatam @tomoyan @droida @curationcoconut @blurttribe @my-angel @blurtconnect-ng and all those I'm forgetting but also each of you.
It's no secret that some people use a maximum of translation to increase the vote of the bots but did you know that in fact their posts work with a rotation system?
This morning, I opened the post of a person I used to vote from time to time 2 months ago before she started to write texts by the mile, and then something caught my eye, so I went to her profile.
From there I opened several of her posts in different tabs, copied a piece of text from the first one and started searching for it in the others via a Ctrl+F. Bingo, on the 8th I found a match.
So I went to an online text comparison site (https://app.copyleaks.com/) to be sure of myself and I copied the text of these 2 post to compare them:
https://blurt.blog/bnwphotography/@dewiasih/my-black-and-white-photography-05-01-2023
https://blurt.blog/bnwphotography/@dewiasih/my-black-and-white-photography-01-01-2023
The result was very clear:
The text is the same, only the order of the translations changes. To confirm this I do it again on different posts and used different online text comparison and always the same result.
For the info this author received 8,366 BLURT as author rewards last month for 32 posts
As I like to put the BeBlurt on the whole width of my Xiaomi Mi Curved Gaming Monitor 34 to have lines of 7 posts per line, go to new posts, and scroll, it made me come across a whole network of posts with a similar technique:
A rotation on 8 days with 6,255 BLURT as author rewards last month for 31 posts:
https://blurt.blog/bungaharianku/@annas58/sgnfc-bunga-harianku-hari-sabtu-kana
https://blurt.blog/bungaharianku/@annas58/6d34qa-bunga-harianku-hari-sabtu-kana
A rotation on 5 days with 7,039 BLURT as author rewards last month for 31 posts:
https://blurt.blog/hitamputih/@bangsam/fotografi-hitam-putih-6-januari-2023
https://blurt.blog/hitamputih/@bangsam/fotografi-hitam-putih-1-januari-20223
A rotation on 4 days with 6,280 BLURT as author rewards last month for 31 posts:
https://blurt.blog/bnwphotograph/@ranesta/black-and-white-photography-post-366
https://blurt.blog/bnwphotograph/@ranesta/black-and-white-photography-post-362
I warned on the Blurt discord for the bot blurtbooster and I invite everyone to be vigilant, a small Ctrl+C then Ctrl+F on another post of the same author can sometimes reveal interesting things ;)
You are not a dev but still want to support the development on Blurt? It's easy and it doesn't cost you anything!
Just vote for my witness @nalexadre here:
https://beblurt.com/@nalexadre/witness
or here https://blurtwallet.com/~witnesses?highlight=nalexadre
And/or for the many other developers on Blurt with a Witness ;)
Original background photo of this post by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
I have reported several times on Discord lists of users who keep creating new accounts and posting spam.
It is often one user who manages multiple accounts and collects the rewards and then sends them to ionomy or somewhere else.
They create new accounts months in advance to activate them later.
As long as blurtbooster votes on nearly every post, nothing will change here and the reward pool will continue to be abused.
Manual votes would be much better, also to find out more quality content and to appreciate creators.
Report those to me as well.
This tactic is abuse of the reward system, and amounts to theft from the good creators and curators here on Blurt.
the more people want something
the more valuable that thing becomes
Don't hesitate to mention me in your Discord report next time if I can help
I hope with the arrival of communities on Blurt changes in the curation of posts, the auto votes must be minority and based only on whitelist. I'm more a fan of delegating to curation leagues with a % of rewardback than big account auto voting.
I'll soon add them to my personal blacklist. Ospin is also one of them
Oh that's a nice catch, I also posted 5 months ago about suspected spammer. Upon checking, some of those accounts were powered down.
https://blurt.blog/blurt/@g10a/spammer-alert-or-alerta-de-spammer
Once you highlight or warn them, they create new accounts.
yes, it's like pulling the gas valve to produce more flame. We'll they're everywhere, we might can't stop them but I think it can be minimized.
The way to stop them is to stop Blurtbooster, which encourages and rewards them. Manual curation is the best way to improve content quality and reduce junk.
Automatic votes do not help much to treat spam, it must be cured manually. I see that they only upload photos of flowers and more flowers, a repetitive text and it seems illogical to me to vote for flower photos. Although it depends on the publication, but I never vote for these types of publications anymore, or I try not to vote for them. There are more accounts out there that use this method of flowers and texts, it's not just these, it always seems strange to me. Regards
Manual curation also can not figure out, you can check r2cornell curation posts. The system is fine, its just the people who fake and make things look bad.
Well done....
Thanks for highlighting this issue. We have also noted and removed some of the authors doing these types of posts. Sometimes it becomes hard as we are unable to monitor every post.
There are many accounts, that just post rubbish content but still get voted.
I think we all curators can do one thing, share a report weekly and tag other curators to block/remove the users involved in such practices.
This would be great, as one eye can see a dot, and more eyes can see the whole picture.
We will share some of the accounts, by today and tag others.
Once again.
Thanks
Perhaps someone can take on the task of finding and outing these spammers who abuse Blurtbooster and other curation efforts? Post a weekly list, with evidence, and encourage others to comment with their suggestions to be added on the next update.
I'm not in favour of deleting or banning accounts, no matter what, but we should definitely have a free-market solution. Making curators aware of them would help. Myself, I only curate manually, and never reward junk like flowers or actifit spam.
Yes, being an open community one can do this. It's up to curation accounts to follow those lists or not, but they should, as it's helpful.
We just checked again, and mentioned users were either not in voting list or removed last week.
Allow me to reBlurt this useful post....
Curate only my account! It was a joke!
i'm glad that television shows and movies and songs only play one time
you only have one chance
playing something a second or third time is always cheating no matter what
:::Discord :::Whatsapp:::Twitter :::
Congratulations!
You have recieved a coconutty upvote! 🥥
Thank you for contributing to the Blurt Blockchain!
Keep up the great work!
Curated by @outofthematrix!
Please take a moment to vote for my witness! 🗳️ https://blurtwallet.com/~witnesses?highlight=outofthematrix
Thank you for investigating and letting us know.
It is a pleasure for us to share our best wishes and congratulations. You have received a virtual hug, from the @newvisionlife account. Curation team.
Living better without thinking about age is our motto
Congratulations, your post has been curated by @dsc-r2cornell. You can use the tag #R2cornell. Also, find us on Discord
Felicitaciones, su publicación ha sido votada por @ dsc-r2cornell. Puedes usar el tag #R2cornell. También, nos puedes encontrar en Discord
So you are saying some authors are duplicating their posts and tricking Blurtbooster?
If so, this is just one more reason Blurtbooster should be stopped. All it is, is Blurt Universal Basic Income, a terrible form of curation that encourages low-quality posts and abuse of the reward pool.
I must note, there are so many garbage posts on this platform, thanks to Blurtbooster. People take a photo of a plant they see outside, and boom, it's another $2 post. I spend about 6 to 8 hours per post writing for Blurt, including research, image or video creation, writing, and editing. It does not come from another platform, it is created for Blurt. I am one of Blurt's highest-paid creators, making about $6 per post currently, even though I only have 122 followers.
This post of yours already has a higher value than any of my posts on Blurt ever. Congratulations!
Didn't you forget another high power bot and the upvu case in your reasoning? Fortunately these 2 bots stopped voting them (great reactivity) and blurtbooster even went to withdraw his votes in the last 7 days, thus losing part of his reward (not to mention the fees).
The biggest problem with voting bots besides being generally basic is that they usually don't have a voting limit. Personally, I am in favor of voting bots only when it's a complement (as limited to 5% / 10% of automatic votes not to have vote power to 100% during hours and the rest in manual) and on the principle of the whitelist only.
Someone able to make daily posts of 2500 words minimum doesn't exist, especially when it's not lifestyle (with personal content) and there again you have to have a very busy life, but in this case doesn't leave time for writing posts. As you said, to make a good post, it takes 6 to 8 hours and usually you get a thousand words maximum.
Reasoning? I asked you a question.... (which you didn't answer.)
I guess there is some language barrier here. I wish I could speak your 1st language, but unfortunately I'm only fluent in English. We have to do our best.
I disagree with you that the biggest problem with voting bots is their lack of voting limit. ANY automatic voting is terrible curation, it doesn't matter if it's 1% of 100%. Automatic voting is the opposite of good curation.
The reasoning is because you only stopped at blurtbooster, but there are other bots and manual curation groups that were also tricked. As for the answer, I think my post is clear on the topic of duplicate content and cheating. Or perhaps, I didn't understand the question?
Oh, yes... I wasn't trying to be complete with my statement, just to point out how horrible Blurtbooster is. It's true there are other automatic bot curation accounts, you're quite right. I wouldn't know how to name them all. Upvu is one of the worst because people like "Offgridlife" buy huge votes and get their spammy garbage posts on Trending that way.
Yes, it appears you misunderstood my question: "So you are saying some authors are duplicating their posts and tricking Blurtbooster?"
I was asking for clarification, because the wording on your post made little sense to me. I find it quite hard to understand your point. Put another way: "Do you mean that certain Blurt users are duplicating their posts to trick Blurtbooster?"
Or: "Is the problem you are point out, that Blurtbooster is being fooled into voting twice on the same content?"
Hopefully my question is clear now. If not, don't worry about it, thanks.
It's a group of people (I think they either know each other or at least are in contact) and their posts are only about 2 themes, black and white photos or flowers. Each of their post is translated in 5 or 6 languages and contains 90% of generalities (example: history of photography, how to take black and white photography...)
What they do
They take the text of their old post that is between 5 and 8 days old (it depends on how many unique posts they have), they change the order of the translation (for example if Spanish was before English, they put it after in the new post), add a beginning text and new photos.
Doing text comparison requires a lot of processor resources (especially when the order is different) and a dedicated analysis database (blockchain queries being too time consuming) that's why bots are easily fooled.
Thanks for the info. Generally what I do when I encounter those accounts is mute (ignore) them so I never have to see them again, and won't ever be tricked into giving them a vote.
free market economics
free market economics
I appreciate you ✨