Free bread, Resteeming services and a mathematical journey

I've been very vocal about my position on this matter. In my opinion the resteeming services are quite useless. They are nothing but memo spamming bots selling the idea of putting flyers on people's windshields as some sort of revolutionary thing. A complete waste of blockchain resources, that I wish more people would recognize as such.




Memo Spam?


It is exactly that, thousands upon thousands of messages being sent to wallets with 0.001 SDB offering "amazing" promotional services. If you've been here for a few days I'm sure you've already gotten bombarded by the worse offenders like @hottopic, @promotedpost and friends.

I realize that it seems like being bothered by their existence is a bit silly, but I've done the numbers. I'm attempting to come up with a proper way of calculating the cost they represent on the operational health of the blockchain, but that particular calculation eludes me at the moment.

How many memos does one of these spammers send out?


That's the key question, and also how many actual memo spammers operate on the blockchain today. I've listed only two of them, but without making much effort I can think of 5 more that offer me those lifetime opportunities I seem to keen on refusing.

I decided to allow my curiosity to take over for a second and ran a little report on @promotedpost activities for one day. Mind you, this is one day of operations, one day of transfers alone. The number is a lot higher than I expected.


promotedpost.PNG

In a 24 hour window the "amazing" service that @promotedpost offers has sent out 751 memos. Let that number sink in for a second, but also take into account that it does not repeat users. How does it pick its would be clients? Does it have a strategy? Is it all random?

I decided to look further into this and noticed that the memos are sent to people that meet certain conditions. It seems to be looking out for users who are:

  • Sending SBD's to a Promotion service already
  • Accounts using bidbots
  • Recent claimed Reward accounts with higher activity

Of course without looking at any code other things I might theorize about how these services work are complete speculation, but I'm inclined to think that they also scan the blockchain for people using their competitors. At least I found a couple of interesting coincidences that seem to suggest this.

Lets crunch some numbers


To make the math a little simpler, lets round up the amount of memos per day that one of these spammy accounts is currently sending out to 800. Some days the number gets quite higher, but lets keep this quick calculation conservative.

Lets also use another conservative number and say we have currently 10 resteeming "services" operating in the same way. They scan, look for users who meet the profile and send out the annoying memos.

  • 800 memos per day * 10 Resteem Bots = 8000 memos per day.
  • 8000 memos = 0.001 SBD transactions = $8 SBD per day
  • $8 SBD per day, $56 SBD per week
  • $3000 + SBD's per year of MEMO SPAM

That's a lot of garbage


A whole year of these spammy spam doing what spam does, which ironically is absolutely nothing. Now, I do know there are those users that use the resteem services, they think its a good deal. However, I submit to you its not, its a waste of money and most users with enough SP to give you a boost, to give you a nice upvote for your work, ignore and sometimes even mute the resteem bots all together.

Who is your target audience? I guess that's the question I have for anyone who is even considering using a resteeming service. Most people who are using these bots, don't read, they just promote their stuff and follow the bot as a condition to use the service they offer. Do you see how the logic is completely flawed?

I realize this post is a bit of tough love, specially if you've been using the resteeming services. I do apologize to those who might feel offended, but I'm seriously attempting to curve the demand for these bots. If enough people realize that they are complete BS, they will stop spamming the network with thousands of SBD's every single month and that sounds like a WIN/WIN for everyone. (except for the spammers, but who cares).

So yeah, they can have the free bread... but they need to stop parking here....


Other posts by yours truly

• the entrance to our farm
• Fishing for None Fishes - Promoting outside of Steem
• Songwriter Shop Talk Steembirds Full Recording
• Good news everyone, Tether is going to moon!
• salt needs to learn how to bark

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