Pinterest - War With Fake Followers and Unfriendly Platform Features
I have recently joined Pinterest (about a month or two ago) and was diligently working on creating boards, pinning, and following as recommended in some strategies. I am not selling anything (yet, might start doing that later). My sole objective is to reach as many people as possible who might be interested in the results of my research in controversial scientific subjects or willing to spread it to other experts they know.
I must admit that my content is quite politically incorrect, addressing the issue of vaccinations, falsified science, alternative energy, healthy nutrition, Monsanto, GMO, etc. Here is the routine I used to do: find a board similar to one of mine and start following about 150 (the max allowed in my case) of its followers in one go. Then check my new followers, follow the real ones, and block those that I think are fake accounts.
In the beginning there were relatively few fake followers, so I just blocked them and ignored the issue. After a while this fight against fake followers started to aggravate. I blocked 10 then 15 new appeared in their place. Blocked those 15, and another 30 new appeared. Blocked those 30, and now it is like for every one real follower I get about 25 or more fake followers. It just deteriorates into a battle impossible to win, because they are using bots for this while I have to fight it manually which is an excruciatingly slow and painful work, thanks to the awkward software of Pinterest.
Instead of Pinterest showing true information (number of boards, followers & following) on the page of my followers and offering the obvious solution to let me tick all the option boxes next to small images of followers who I want to block, I have to manually open all those followers and wait for ages to load. When they finally load, then I discover that some who were marked as having 0 boards actually have boards with decent number of pins as well, so they seem to be real accounts and not to be blocked. But most of these having 0 boards with usually less than 1000 followers (but this is not an exclusive criteria, some have thousands of followers) are obviously fake accounts. They use stock profile images, which have lately deteriorated into disgusting sex images (might not be totally naked, but you know what I mean...).
Now here comes the kicker. After I finish a battle of blocking about 10 of these fake followers that takes about 50-60 clicks to accomplish, I refresh my followers page, and lo and behold, some of those I have just blocked are still there, and some new ones have appeared. Then I persist and block them a second time, then they are gone, but the new ones never stop coming. Some say that this is due to some kind of a glitch, or technical error, but this is not true. This inconsistency is present consistently every single time I do my blocking chores. Some of those I have just blocked don't get blocked during every single session like clockwork. The instant appearance of new fake followers after each blocking blocking session is also a routine phenomenon, no matter how fast I can accomplish a blocking. It is like the spam comes (or at least being facilitated by) Pinterest itself.
The flood of fake followers with 0 boards, few followers, and semi-pornographic profile images has become so intensive that yesterday after a cleaning session I have decided to temporarily suspend my account. It is like a DDoS attack against real Pinterest users to contaminate their accounts and spam them out of existence.
I have a screenshot as an example to show what kind of fake follower images I am talking about and that they come in batches one after the other if anybody is interested to see it.
So I am looking for a humanely possible solution to this problem, without the need to buy a software (or pay for a commercial service) to delete these fakes for me automatically and fight fire with fire. A non-automatic solution that speeds up the process of manual blocking and makes it easier similar to PinFollow would be also a great help.
Does anybody else have the same (or similar) problem? What can we do about it?
Thanks,
Zoltan
I must admit that my content is quite politically incorrect, addressing the issue of vaccinations, falsified science, alternative energy, healthy nutrition, Monsanto, GMO, etc. Here is the routine I used to do: find a board similar to one of mine and start following about 150 (the max allowed in my case) of its followers in one go. Then check my new followers, follow the real ones, and block those that I think are fake accounts.
In the beginning there were relatively few fake followers, so I just blocked them and ignored the issue. After a while this fight against fake followers started to aggravate. I blocked 10 then 15 new appeared in their place. Blocked those 15, and another 30 new appeared. Blocked those 30, and now it is like for every one real follower I get about 25 or more fake followers. It just deteriorates into a battle impossible to win, because they are using bots for this while I have to fight it manually which is an excruciatingly slow and painful work, thanks to the awkward software of Pinterest.
Instead of Pinterest showing true information (number of boards, followers & following) on the page of my followers and offering the obvious solution to let me tick all the option boxes next to small images of followers who I want to block, I have to manually open all those followers and wait for ages to load. When they finally load, then I discover that some who were marked as having 0 boards actually have boards with decent number of pins as well, so they seem to be real accounts and not to be blocked. But most of these having 0 boards with usually less than 1000 followers (but this is not an exclusive criteria, some have thousands of followers) are obviously fake accounts. They use stock profile images, which have lately deteriorated into disgusting sex images (might not be totally naked, but you know what I mean...).
Now here comes the kicker. After I finish a battle of blocking about 10 of these fake followers that takes about 50-60 clicks to accomplish, I refresh my followers page, and lo and behold, some of those I have just blocked are still there, and some new ones have appeared. Then I persist and block them a second time, then they are gone, but the new ones never stop coming. Some say that this is due to some kind of a glitch, or technical error, but this is not true. This inconsistency is present consistently every single time I do my blocking chores. Some of those I have just blocked don't get blocked during every single session like clockwork. The instant appearance of new fake followers after each blocking blocking session is also a routine phenomenon, no matter how fast I can accomplish a blocking. It is like the spam comes (or at least being facilitated by) Pinterest itself.
The flood of fake followers with 0 boards, few followers, and semi-pornographic profile images has become so intensive that yesterday after a cleaning session I have decided to temporarily suspend my account. It is like a DDoS attack against real Pinterest users to contaminate their accounts and spam them out of existence.
I have a screenshot as an example to show what kind of fake follower images I am talking about and that they come in batches one after the other if anybody is interested to see it.
So I am looking for a humanely possible solution to this problem, without the need to buy a software (or pay for a commercial service) to delete these fakes for me automatically and fight fire with fire. A non-automatic solution that speeds up the process of manual blocking and makes it easier similar to PinFollow would be also a great help.
Does anybody else have the same (or similar) problem? What can we do about it?
Thanks,
Zoltan
