I hate to start a controversial topic that might take away a Newbies ability to earn money, but if a good number of you are going to cheat then fuck off.
My assumption is always that most of the bounty spam accounts belong to a small group of people.
I wrote
Why not tag all bounty hunters? earlier this year. To summarize my clickbait:
If tagging them doesn't work, if the forum doesn't ban their low-quality posts, and if they don't bring anything good at all, can't we just ignore them completely? Don't mention them in Reputation (sorry, I'm guilty too), don't mention them in Scam Accusations, don't look for "alts" as long as they have nothing to lose, don't tag them, but just ignore them completely?
Even if you don't allow them to join your bounty campaign, someone else will.
Companies contact us and we give them an idea of the participation we might get them in a bounty campaign, but the numbers are way off since we are allowing these cheaters to join. Essentially, we are no better than the bounty cheaters because we are unknowingly lying. Well most are unknowingly lying. Others just down right don't give a damn long as they get paid.
As long as they pay in made-up tokens, I'm sure they don't care who spams for them, as long as they get maximum exposure.
Now, what about managers? Should we tag managers who are outright being dishonest by allowing Newbies?
That will mean they too will use Newbie accounts for it. Nothing will change, as long as the forum allows it. So I stay away from the bounty spam boards, and when I see their shitposts on other boards, I report them.
Or tag managers who really aren't caring about the forum?
If you tag them, it should be because there's a trade risk involved, not because they don't care about the forum. All those tags on Newbies only make people used to seeing red tags, so it reduces the warning potential for real scammers.
I dare to go a step further: the professional spammers who create 99.9% of whatever BS tokens the bounty spammers are advertising, they don't care about the forum either. Just like altcoins used to use the forum to promote their coin, just like ICOs used to do, and just like bounties are doing now. And just like I assume most bounty spam accounts are owned by a small group of people, I also assume most of BS tokens that are being created by a small group of people. I had the same assumption with ICOs: the websites are all more or less the same, the approach is the same, the "campaign" is the same. And those people earned millions if not billions from this. Bitcointalk is just a small part of their means to get money out of gullible greedy "investors".
What about decreasing bounty reward allocation for social media campaigns? Will it decrease the amount of newbie cheaters, because it will be unprofitable to join even with multiple accounts?
I expect the opposite: it's not worth it for normal people with friends and family on their social media, but it's still profitable for spammers with 50 accounts, each with thousands of followers who are all bounty spammers too.
The fact that the bounty spammers all have that much followers while all they do is spam should be a dead giveaway they're not normal social media users but dedicated spammers.
If there are seriously that few that join a bounty and 95% of the rest are multis, then what the hell are companies wasting money running a bounty on here then?
That's the thing: they don't waste
money, they share some of the BS tokens they created out of thin air.