Ethereum Private Message Ads on Reddit

I’ve been getting multiple PMs from different people on Reddit about switching to Ethereum from Bitcoin. Some of them even disguise the advertising as if they were asking me an innocent question about Ethereum while linking an article about it. Has anyone else been getting these? It’s been going on for a couple weeks now.

Here are the ones I’ve received so far…

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Yup I’ve received a few messages too. A few people in /r/BitcoinMarkets were complaining about them and requesting that all Ethereum discussion be banned from the subreddit.

I just updated the op with all the ones I’ve received. Annoying people like this can’t be a good way to advertise their network.

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I had an interesting conversation with an eth dev about this. Basically, no one in their community thinks its their responsibility to actually do anythjng about the spam, and there’s a general statement of ‘one bad apple’. Meanwhile, they are enjoying their pump and dump spamcoin. I had several responses that were very pro-spam (because any advertisement is good advertisement right?). It’s kind of sad, I had high hopes for the eth communuty. Sucks they’re going the road of paycoin and the like, all bark no bite.

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I don’t give much attention to some people or community of a coin but rather to coin’s technology and dev teams.
Ethereum is something different like NU and has a future. We have to cooperate with it in some way.
Of course, if community is in a high level (like we are here) then so much better :slight_smile:

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I don’t see how any community could do anything about people doing things like this, beside asking them not to, which isn’t guaranteed to be effective. I wouldn’t condemn the whole community. Imagine if people were to do this to intentionally cause bad reputation.

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Can we do something like this for NU? :wink:

When we were accused of spamming we made a post on our forum and discussed how that is detremental to our image. Their community talks about how any exposure is good exposure. I very much believe the community is important, the communuty crafts the tech. Without the humans the coin is meaningless.

If this were happening in our community you can bet we would have a thread on our forum calling them out and specifying exactly why it’s bad for us. I would start compiling a list of every post and effort we make to inform the attacker that they are only doing us harm. Then, i would make the only possible conclusion: the attacker is outside the community. And if anyone started talking about ‘one bad apple’ or ‘any publicity is good publicity’ i would have a very long winded discussion to help them see the light: that fair play and reputation is vastly more important than pumping the price.

Anyway, it’s not my community, so in the end i just join everyone else in shrugging my shoulders and going ‘oh well, such a shame’.

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Lol, i just got a pm from the spammer apologizing in the form of spam so we can all have a pitty party for a stranger’s wounded ego.

Hire a bunch of people on fiverr and make a video about it?

Lol, I did too.

I didn’t know about fiverr!
I thought that this had been done by their community, free of charge :slight_smile:

It sure doesn’t feel like that to me :baby_chick:

I agree, though the Ethereum community has almost unanimously condemned the action of the spammer (3 of 6 top threads on Ethereum Reddit are about this), so I’m not sure there’s more they can do.

It is rubbish, and I hope the spammer is being sincere in his spam apology message, but I’m guessing he’s just being incredibly annoying & winding people up!

Yah, 2 weeks later. You shoulda heard them when the first wave of spam created a pump in eth price. Everyone was all ‘what can we do? May as well buy some eth and profit off of underhanded strategies’. Now, finally 2 weeks later, people are saying “hey, this isn’t cool” and lo and behold the spammer goes “oh, I guess it’s not cool. Ok, I’ll stop, wish you guys had told me sooner.”

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So you think the spam was significant in causing the spike in price?

My first spam message was on the 18th, and the price was certainly a lot lower at that point, though it got a lot higher around 25th Jan, and I’m hoping due to reasons other than the spammers?

I guess we’ll never know what impact the spam had, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned a lot of people off, rather than causing the rapid price growth. It’d certainly be disappointing if this kind of behaviour became more common in the crypto scene.

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The first response to the spam attack was a sticky on their subreddit posted on Jan 15th. As far as I can tell, no one ever even discussed the spam in their forum. So therefore, the Nu community has talked more about the ethereum spam attacks of january 2016 than the ethereum community itself. So yah, they were totally complacent in a pump and dump scheme.