It is usually a good news to have a new follower. But there are also exceptions. Let's have a look at follower bot, in steemit in a mintue...
Don't be happy too early! The increase in number of followers sometimes may not be a real natural growth as you thought. In some cases, it could be a bot who followed you on purpose.
For general users, it is not easy to find out who are the new followers. It is because the follower page on steemit list your followers simply in alphabetical order. There is no other indicators such as new or not.
Therefore, you may not aware you are in fact being followed by a bot easily.
As I introduced last time in this post.
How to get steemit events notified on mobile - steemit in a minute #34.
We may use GINABot to get updates of many steemit events, including new followers and unfollowers. Let's see an example...
Above is a snaphot of discord direct message received from @GINABot. We can see I had a new follower at 6:47AM. That new follower did unfollow me at 7:08AM on the same day!
Well, if this does not mean he/she is a bot, let us see the number of follows and followers or that particular account.
As of 6:47AM, this account followed 21,167 and being followed by 6,488 users.
As of 7:08AM, this account followed 18,948 and being followed by 6,500 users.
That means, this account successfully get 12 new followers in 21 minutes by massively following people with a chance of being followed back.
We can also see this account did unfollow 2,219 people in 21 minutes. This is likely for another round of new auto follow. In other words, this account will follow/unfollow you many times until you follow back.
So...what is the purpose of doing so? Let's have a look at the page of this account.
Apparently, the purpose is to resteem content to a large number of users. For this particular example, I did not find it charge for resteem yet. But there are many other examples out there on steemit who provide resteem service at a cost. The fee of resteem range from less than 1 SBD to 3 SBD depends on the number of followers.
Next time when you find someone did unfollow you, don't be so sad. It could be only a bot action.
Thank you for reading.
