There are so many blockchain social platforms out there that are awesome and so many more that are scams, shams, and full of spam. Let’s dive into what you should avoid.

Recently I’d posted on Twitter in response to Whaleshares claiming to be a great blockchain platform saying it was a scam and they wanted proof. While I’m at it I figured I’d cover some other less than honest platforms and or ones you’re better off avoiding entirely. I will also briefly mention some of the platforms that closed down last year.

Also, a quick shoutout to YouTube creators who are struggling with the new changes around commercial viability – check out LBRY, Steem, DTube, Bitchute, Gab, Flote, Cent, Cos.TV, UGetTube, OpenTube, TokenTuber, Minds, Uptrennd, and Sapien.

On top of covering Whaleshares which is the main focus, I will quickly go over Weku’s failure, Bearshares outright resetting everyone’s holdings, and why DLive is a scam and you should avoid it. Here’s one of my main explanations about DLive: https://youtu.be/--ritc7liOw. This is everything I could find. Mind you, this happened over a year ago. Also note that Narrative was essentially a scam and is done: https://youtu.be/-XwkcdugEGQ and recently Hyperspace also closed down.

I was on Whaleshares from the very beginning as they continuously claimed they were do everything Steem didn’t and improve everything especially removing upvote bots. It wasn’t more than a couple of weeks before they started their own witness only bots. The votes were instantaneous with no spam checking or low-quality checks. Many launched their Whaletokens to score some profit outside of the system and they did. They took a good amount of my money as I was keen that Whaleshares would do well even though they abandoned their values.

https://whaleshares.nl/everyone/ - They have about 5,359 accounts on there currently using it.

Not but a few months later they all stopped supporting this and dropped their support for their own tokens making them lose all value and basically scamming anyone dumb enough to invest in them like me. Mind you, I do this to test out new platforms to see if they are scams etc., so it’s fine. I had earned about 14,000 Whaleshares before this happened just from witness votes.

Now the issue I had was only with the few I tested out and used, but these were top witnesses at the time. I also addressed this to the staff and friends of the staff and they said something along the lines of “yes it’s controversial and we have disagreements amongst the witnesses, but it’s happening.”

These are the known witnesses who had “Whaletokens” then stopped abruptly making the token worth nothing.

https://whaleshares.io/@ienrikex – MILK

https://whaleshares.io/@milkbox.tutorial/how-to-get-rewards-from-a-whale-in-whaleshares-with-milk

https://whaleshares.io/@milkbox.info/milk-as-a-whaletoken-how-where-get-in-project-milkbox

https://whaleshares.io/@nepd – HAIRSHARES

https://whaleshares.io/@fiasteemproject – FSTSH (The Goon)

Unfortunately, other than my trading history sending back and forth with these witnesses I don’t have much other evidence. Discord deleted my conversations more than a year old so I couldn’t get anything on the witness who sold FSTSH known as FIATSTEEM or “The Goon.” I did however find a post he made on Smoke.io that backed up what I’m claiming: https://smoke.io/introduceyourself/@fiasteem/a-brief-defination-of-fstsh and on Steem: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@fiasteem/a-brief-defination-of-fstsh. His real name is Pranish Ghimire. This is “The Goon” - https://twitter.com/_PranishGhimire

In the posts above for the FSTSH token, it says “The votes are sponsored by our Awesome Friend Darren Claxton.”

You can see the votes given to me in 2019 and 2018 on my block explorer to corroborate this and the huge votes from @nepd, @fiatsteemproject, and @ienrikex: https://explorer.whaleshares.io/#/account/scottcbusiness

Let me know what you think, but the conclusion I came to was any attempt at rebooting Steem was really an attempt at getting the early profits that Steemians made and not about improving the platform or making a better alternative.

It must be said first that this platform is pretty dead and the staff hasn’t even posted for over a year. I would assume that’s because when Weku could finally be sold on exchanges it was worth so little, something like my 14,000 Weku was only worth $1 when I’d paid people 0.01 – 0.03 per Weku in the past. The reason it was sold so low because it didn’t have a market value and people had abused Weku for free Weku because the registration was very flawed in giving out 100 Weku rather than lending it as Steem has done. People abused this and sold it massively devaluing the platform. Honestly though, I feel as though it would have never been worth much anyway, though I still wanted to set myself up in case it did.

Here you can see that even the staff haven’t posted in over a year: https://deals.weku.io/@weku-team. Here are several posts by them detailing the scammers and issues on the platform: https://deals.weku.io/community-deals/@weku-official/announcement-multiple-accounts-to-collect-bonus-not-ku-cool

https://deals.weku.io/community-deals/@ijoel/spam-scam-phishing-abuse-become-the-biggest-threat-that-must-be-fighted

https://deals.weku.io/community-deals/@weku-team/fake-accounts

https://deals.weku.io/community-deals/@fang/regarding-the-issue-of-automatic-account-registration-using-bots-notice-from-the-weku-team

So apparently, they had issues with bots registering, phishing, and scams running rampant on the platform according to the staff themselves. It didn’t last long as most people left the platform. While there are still users on here trying to earn enough to recoup their losses, I can bet it’s a tiny portion of people.

SocialChainz - https://socialchainz.io/

Their platform is sloppy and very manually run. What do I mean by this? Well, it’s so centralized that you cannot change your profile picture without moderator approval. I’m not joking. I had to request approval for so many simple edits to my profile that it was the most time-consuming social experience I’ve ever had. Not to mention that when using the platform, I had signed up and then they accidentally deleted my account and then reinstated it and trying to access it now, it was deleted, AGAIN.

Not only that, but their registration process is the most tedious and cumbersome of any platform in existence. You need to do full KYC, take photos, give your ID, and do a liveliness test with a video just to sign up. They say this will remove any potential for fake or bot accounts, but it also prevents any anonymity whatsoever or any companies or non-human profiles. They think the future of social is a highly centralized, highly monitored one. They want to use blockchain and yet think YouTube and Facebook actually don’t do enough.

I did an interview with the CEO and founder and I thought maybe it had the slightest of chances, but then he lied and said that there are over 50,000 users and tons of people posting and when I got on and looked at the discover section, there were only posts by him and a couple of staff. He just wanted to create hype from our interview, so I didn’t post it. It was actually the first and only interview I’ve ever held due to misinformation.

It’s not a scam, but it’s not something you should trust with all that personal information when they’re willing to lie and act dishonestly while forcing you to give them all the control and access.

Not only did the platform reset and make everyone lose their Bearshares and even all of their posts which I cannot prove because everything was wiped, but you can see that I don’t have an account on there and that’s because it was erased.

The co-founder explains in this post how Bilal the other co-founder stole all of Noganoo’s funds and screwed him out of his funds in the platform: https://deals.weku.io/community-deals/@noganoo/warning-accounts-are-being-seized-by-bearshares-founder-and-scammer-bilal-haider-do-not-buy-into-the-bearshares-scam

Mind you, old posts on Weku don’t support stored images so a lot of the screenshots are gone, so you can take it as you will.

Bearshares it widely known for scams and abusing its own users. I have not resigned up because apparently he’s also been able to seize people’s passwords and abuse that elsewhere so I highly recommend avoiding this platform at all costs even more so than anywhere else.

I’ve already shared countless videos and blogs on why this is basically a scam and not to be trusted so I will simply reshare the information I’ve shared previously and link a few videos I’ve done. Here’s the thing though they originally started on Steem and abandoned Steem. They then said Lino network would solve their problems, but it was hardly a real blockchain, now DLive was bought by Tron and will integrate with the Tron blockchain. It’s hard to believe that they care at all about their community, but I feel that them being on Tron will be the best possible situation for them and maybe just maybe it will solve all of their problems.

This is my latest blog about this: https://www.minds.com/scottcbusiness/blog/dlive-migrates-blockchains-for-the-third-time-1060445008417239040

This is the YouTube video for it: https://youtu.be/7U5dPGbChLI

Justin’s tweet: https://twitter.com/justinsuntron/status/1211683179326824450

DLive’s tweet: https://twitter.com/OfficialDLive/status/1211682578345803776

They also added another awful requirement that you must stream at least 3 days and 8 hours on DLive to be eligible to get paid/withdraw your own purchased funds.

I will be doing a new video on this very soon as well. Everything below is in relation to their existence on Lino and doesn’t speculate or take into account what they might do on Tron. Either way though, 3 blockchain network migrations is more than too many. It’s all about buying up PewDiePie’s influence.

DLive Is Overly Centralized And Misleading - https://youtu.be/--ritc7liOw

This was the original video I made covering Dlive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq9E6WEK-VE

Every time I have gone back and taken another look at DLive, it’s always more centralized than before. I don’t know what people are missing. minimum withdrawals, ID to withdraw, huge purchasing fees, not listed on an exchange, pro-censorship, and Lino is not a “real” cryptocurrency.

I didn’t think I’d have to make another video pointing this out, but as DLive continues to grow and more people seem to believe the publisher is using the blockchain or at the very least that is decentralized while both are not the case. I will give them that they seem to be making use of the blockchain to some small degree, but everything about it is still centralized. Out of the very few validators (witnesses), they have 7 out of 11 are owned by DLive, so that isn’t very promising either. They do have a lot more information on their blockchain here: https://docs.lino.network/blockchain/account.html

It has a better value proposition than Twitch with no platform cuts, but with everything else and especially for those buying Lino points, it’s a scam. Don’t buy on mobile to avoid their 30% fees! I almost never make videos and content bashing a platform directly, but honestly, PewDiePie is attracting so much attention there and everyone is being misled. I feel that making this video is necessary to keep people in the know and aware of what’s going on.

You can see this all for yourself on their site: https://dlive.tv/

You can find their April Lino point purchase fee update here: https://community.dlive.tv/2019/04/03/lino-points-purchase-fee-update/

Trybe, Other EOS, & TRON Platforms - https://trybe.one/

I’ve recently wrote about how the majority of TRON and EOS platforms are just for gambling. The very few social platforms that exist have little to no community or lack any support from staff, developers, etc. Also, EOS for months now has been suffering from CPU overuse and unless you have a ridiculous amount of money staked, you cannot do anything on the platform.

This was my latest video detailing this issue: https://youtu.be/wwKdV-5gGX0

It’s also really important to consider how much of EOS is centralized in terms of where it’s held and who controls the majority in China. People have also been concerned about EOS being too centralized. The majority of EOS is held by entities in China prompting fears of state intervention

Considering it had a 4.1 billion-dollar ICO, it is pretty ridiculous how poorly the DApp market has evolved and many developers haven’t been able to make money contributing to the network demotivating and disincentivizing them to continue doing so.

Block.one is the company that launched the code is the largest token holder and could easily redefine the governance of the chain at any time which again is centralized, and they don’t bother to.

EOS founder was forced to pay 24 million dollars to the SEC and you can find one article on this here: https://coincodex.com/article/5339/eos-developer-blockone-agrees-to-pay-24-million-fine-following-sec-settlement-a-slap-on-the-wrist/. I suggest checking out this article for more information on this: https://www.coindesk.com/everyones-worst-fears-about-eos-are-proving-true

I just recently shared this regarding TRON & EOS: https://youtu.be/wwKdV-5gGX0

Below are some of my previous videos on EOS platforms:

My first EOS dapp review: https://youtu.be/4Wyo7sDl-fY

My follow up EOS dapp review: https://youtu.be/oOxUuTHhIUo

My final re-review of EOS dapps: https://youtu.be/-Cyk_GnTc_U

This one is simple and brief. It’s not that Viewly has unscrupulous practices or anything, but you have to spend crypto for every post you publish, and the platform is all but abandoned at this point. I don’t want you on here wasting your time and money thinking that your participating in an active and working platform.

Platforms That Closed Down

Every single one of these I said don’t use this, it won’t last, and I put them under my not recommended sections for the majority of my 5 comprehensive reviews so far all except SOLA.

Currently, platforms that have closed are as listed: Hyperspace, Narrative, SOLA, Editonial, and TouchSocial. These were all recently closed down in the last year or so and the list will keep growing. My assumption is EOS platforms will be joining this list next due to the reasons listed above.

Conclusion

The conclusion here is that you need to watch out for the various platforms out there that might be trying to take advantage of how new the space is or has a model set up in a very sketchy way. Some telltale signs to look for regarding legitimacy and questions to consider are:

Does the platform require you to give them money to utilize its full features? (Narrative didn’t let you earn as much unless you paid them to certify)

Does it have a history of abusing its users and not correcting for the damage caused? (Bearshares & Whaleshares)

Is the price of their currency controlled by them or the market? (DLive)

Has their platform been abused by its own users and or provide ways that enabled users to abuse the platform? (Weku)

Is the platform too centralized? (Hyperspace)

Does the platform have staff that are there to actually fix problems? (Weku)

Do you have full control and access to your funds? (DLive & Trybe)

Does the platform have a history of censorship? (DLive)

Do they make fake claims about their product and or require ridiculous amounts of data for verification? (SocialChainz)

Is their network reliable? (Trybe)

Did they have a massive ICO but then struggle to provide users with value? (Narrative)

These are just some questions to consider. I will always be out there testing platforms in this space on your behalf. I will be investing some money and putting considerable time into each major platform to fully test them out and share my findings in my comprehensive reviews that I update and put out every 3 months or so. You can find my last review here on Minds and also on many other platforms: https://www.minds.com/scottcbusiness/blog/comprehensive-blockchain-social-media-platforms-review-iv-1038934439106088960

Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and don’t forget to subscribe!