Spam is annoying for all of us. For new users who are not very well versed in crypto, they could mean the loss of their funds and a potential broken trust in cryptocurrency and freedoms we love and they might become more willing towards government regulation and/or custodial assets where your crypto will be held by banking institutions made almost impossible to withdraw. 

There are all sorts of spam. The ones that seem to come from an important place are the ones that can fool the most amount of people. It has come to a point where a account with Reputation score of 69 ca become a spammer (or worse - I didn't follow the link that was posted)

https://i.postimg.cc/Fs4PTPGT/Spam.png

This was under a @splinterlands giveaway results post I had made earlier today. After each 9 Reputation levels, the next 9 levels become 10 times harder. [You can read here how it is calculated.](https://hive.blog/steemit/@digitalnotvir/how-reputation-scores-are-calculated-the-details-explained-with-simple-math) In simple terms, a large number you can find at https://hiveblocks.com/@username has its log base
- -9
- *9
- +25 (This is why Reputations starts at 25)

and the number you get is rounded to the nearest integer. Every upvote increase the reputation. The reverse is only true if the downvoting account has higher reputation than the account being downvoted.
https://i.postimg.cc/cCyc5my7/Reputation.png
# Muting Doesn't Help (The Ecosystem)
It can be easy to simply click on this button and keep the spam out of your sight. But it won't be going away from other users. These high reputation accounts who have been around for years (in this case, over 3 years) could be compromised accounts. Maybe some of them turned to the dark side or just decided to be plain annoying. 

https://i.postimg.cc/k4jj18Mf/Mute.png


### Use Your Free Downvotes
I was ageist the free downvotes and I think free downvoting power equivalent to 25% of the voting power is just too much. I almost never use this. But at times like this, it is very convenient when asking the community to wage some downvotes for a just cause. 

- The spam are not helping anyone
- It is annoying
- Spam could potentially lead to scams and other cybercrime
- It is bad for the platform

### Calling All High Reputation Accounts
You are the ones who are capable of taking the reputation of these spam accounts down. They are even earning rewards for the spam they have been posting. This use I discovered is @maikuraki There could be many more. Feel free to share about them below.