The beginning of the end for bots and spam.

LunarCrush
4 min readMay 24, 2022

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You see it across social media everyday. Spam accounts, bot replies, fake giveaways, phishing attempts. Every bot was created by a human and as you have noticed, there are a lot of them. More spam accounts than you would think are actually people. People operating multiple accounts or many individual people operating one single account, versus a so-called stealthy algorithm running in the night. This is why it is so hard for a bot which was written to detect spam, to actually catch spam. It takes little effort for even the least tech-savvy person to outsmart a bot trying to stop them in their mission.

What is their mission?

There is an array of reasons these accounts are created and most of it boils down to two simple things, someone making an attempt at influencing the way you think or someone trying to take something from you. That someone has organized and exploited a large group or many large groups anywhere the cost-benefit ratio allows them to, which almost always is low-income areas.

Bots and spam are big business and it is more prevalent than ever. Since LunarCrush started collecting crypto-specific social data in 2019, spam is at an all-time high. Up almost 4,000% in the last 2 years. The fastest growing metric out of all our social metrics.

Spam Volume collected by LunarCrush over the previous 2 years. Source: LunarCrush.com
Percentage increase across all Social Metrics collected by LunarCrush over the previous 2 years. Source: LunarCrush.com

Doesn’t LunarCrush already protect against bots and spam? Great question and the answer is yes. Today LunarCrush curates from millions of posts and billions of engagements, one of the most personalized and relevant feeds available in web3. Full of trending news, posts, insights, opinions, and alerts focused on cryptocurrencies. We have spent the better part of the last 3 years fine tuning our algorithms with the goal always being to make them insanely accurate while delivering ultra fast.

However we needed to ask ourselves,

“How we continue creating the best experience for our community knowing spam is the fastest growing metric on social media?”

With a larger question of,

“How do we create the best experience for any community knowing spam is the fastest growing metric on social media?”

We aim to solve both of these questions starting with our community and this is why we are introducing LunarCrush Sparks.

Why Sparks? A spark is a trace of quality or intense feeling by definition, but frankly we know it is so much more. It is a new beginning.

Our new beginning with LunarCrush Sparks is the beginning of the end for bots and spam.

Starting today, LunarCrush will crowd-source intelligence and our community will start combating this major disturbance on social media together.

Your Contribution

With LunarCrush Sparks you can provide feedback across our already curated feed which will train our crypto-specific machine learning in real-time. Initially, this looks as simple as a thumbs up and a thumbs down button on each post. Simply read through posts and if you like them and find them valuable, hit thumbs up 👍. If you think a post has no value, hit thumbs down 👎 and help classify it as not valuable, spam, or unrelated.

The Collective Impact

Classifying posts at scale takes machine learning training to an entirely new level. As the community provides feedback, feeds will continually become cleaner and more accurate. In addition, your content can become increasingly personalized, giving you more of what matters to your most.

This data will also improve our collection as it helps annotate discrepancies at-scale for data organization around items such as content redundancy, community specific language, and localization.

Your Rewards

By providing feedback on LunarCrush Sparks, you earn rewards. Community members who maintain a strong LunarCrush Profile Strength will earn points for providing feedback on up to 30 posts every day, earning anywhere from 30–120 points. These points will be added on top of all other points including points for LunarCrush Opinions™ spending time on LunarCrush each day. Points are converted to Lunr tokens every 24 hours via the current daily point reward system on LunarCrush.

The Future

We are excited to begin this process on LunarCrush where we are looking at content from across Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and News Sites, however we realized the problem of spam and bots goes far beyond these platforms.

Our mission is to create an agnostic library which over time will be fully interoperable and composable across any platform, usable by any person, company, DAO, or organization.

We believe the world deserves better social discourse. LunarCrush Sparks is us sparking the conversation and calling on anyone who believes the future of interacting online must be as bot-free and spam-free as possible. You cannot stand idly by, you must act. This is us acting.

Get involved by checking out LunarCrush.com today!

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