Hi @steematt, thanks very much for the idea. It’s an idea worth exploring. It will be interesting to see if he actually notices the private chat message. Have you some experience of this kind of situation and how it worked?
As you can see in my comment I did not flag him or downvote, but rather encouraged him to write something worthy of upvotes.
It’s difficult to strike the right balance in these kinds of situations as anything one says could be misunderstood, so I try to be as helpful as possible.
I do realise that for many they are writing in a foreign language, which means it is difficult to write long comments. I try to take that into account when assessing the situation.
Some of the people I commented changed their behaviour and started to earn more money by writing interesting and thoughtful comments.
I would be interested to learn of any experiences you have had with suspected spammers, and what worked and what didn’t.
Hi @swissclive. I made a mistake early on in my first week on steemit trying to call someone out for selling their steem while they were blogging to promote people buying it. I was so sure I saw their conflicting actions in their wallet that I called them out for it on their post. The poster got extremely defensive and sort of reprimanded me for not addressing my thoughts in that sense within a private chat. It was a misunderstanding on my part per their defense. Since then, I've sort of agreed to that in my mind and occasionally speak up to help everyone involved avoid any potential public shame.
Understood. Public shame can be very distressing for the recipient. That's why when doing it in a public forum I try to be very gentle to start with "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you were genuinely trying to encourage the poster". The problem is that steemitchat is foreign to many users here, so I am not sure it would work with someone who hasn't even understood steemit etiquette yet.