Smule Unfollow: How to beat the Follow to Unfollow tactics by spammers

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10 hours ago, realyquick said:

they should have more than 1000 followers, and they should follow about 10% of the number of people who follows them

My profile fits that. 

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4 hours ago, opentype said:

My profile fits that. 

👌👌😀

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18 hours ago, duojet24 said:

If you look at your profile on a desktop / laptop through smule.com, it should show your full list of followers / followees, even if you have more than 500. What's more, it'll list them in chronological order, so the person who followed you, or whom you followed, most recently, should appear at the top of the list. It only seems to work on an actual computer, though. 

Great tip! Thanks! 😀 I personally don't have 500+ followers or followees yet but it's cool and helpful to be able to see them chronologically. And it's great to know that there's (at least for now) a way to scroll through all of them even if they should increase beyond 500. 

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16 hours ago, realyquick said:

My metric for a good singer (which "usually" seems to work) is: they should have more than 1000 followers, and they should follow about 10% of the number of people who follows them😀

So if they have 2000 followers then they should follow about 200, and so on. Of course there will be exceptions but this has worked for me, and if I get lots of joins from unknown people, then this is the metric I use to figure out who to listen to first😁

I definitely can see what you mean, but I'm happy to see that you wrote that your metric "usually" seems to work, because--obviously--every good singer has to start somewhere 😅 I'm sometimes baffled by how few followers some really excellent singers have, and then I realize that they are either new, not on Smule regularly, or simply rarely interacting with others.

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3 hours ago, Nathan D said:

I definitely can see what you mean, but I'm happy to see that you wrote that your metric "usually" seems to work, because--obviously--every good singer has to start somewhere 😅 I'm sometimes baffled by how few followers some really excellent singers have, and then I realize that they are either new, not on Smule regularly, or simply rarely interacting with others.

Very true, and total number of songs are indicative of a newbie. A great new singer will usually pick up followers pretty quickly because most people will eventually listen -- or at least start listening 😁 -- to every join. And if the join is good, they'll listen to it all the way through.

I would guess no more than about 10% of people are genuinely melodious, the kind you really enjoy listening to, and that applies to the smule population as well. The good news is that most people can improve if they work at it and practice regularly.

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@duojet24 that’s awesome! Thanks for the tip. I don’t have a computer with internet access atm, but it’s something I’m looking to do in the near future. I don’t think it works that way in Safari on my iPad, but I’m too lazy to login and find out 😂 but maybe I’ll check it out some time.

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@Nathan D that is a good idea, for Smule to automatically remove suspended accounts from our lists. However, I am not entirely sure that Smule isn’t behind the fake accounts. Similar to how celebrities buy followers for their social media accounts, I suspect that Smule buys fake accounts to make users think people are actually following and may join their songs, giving them a reason to keep using Smule. Especially when most of the fake accounts appear to be of the opposite sex and hit on sad old folks like myself.

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On 8/2/2022 at 5:24 PM, realyquick said:

My metric for a good singer (which "usually" seems to work) is: they should have more than 1000 followers, and they should follow about 10% of the number of people who follows them😀

So if they have 2000 followers then they should follow about 200, and so on. Of course there will be exceptions but this has worked for me, and if I get lots of joins from unknown people, then this is the metric I use to figure out who to listen to first😁

On the flip side, there are also singers who sound like dying cats, yet have 100 times more followers and joins on their songs because they are nice to look at and/or are involved in numerous groups and support chats.

Editing to add: that sounded kind of harsh. As long as singing on Smule makes people happy, I’m happy for them.

Edited August 4 by DuetWithAlli
Checking myself before I wreck myself

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On 8/4/2022 at 3:29 AM, DuetWithAlli said:

@Nathan D that is a good idea, for Smule to automatically remove suspended accounts from our lists. However, I am not entirely sure that Smule isn’t behind the fake accounts. Similar to how celebrities buy followers for their social media accounts, I suspect that Smule buys fake accounts to make users think people are actually following and may join their songs, giving them a reason to keep using Smule. Especially when most of the fake accounts appear to be of the opposite sex and hit on sad old folks like myself.

Yes, I also suspect something similar. Even if Smule don't create fake accounts themselves (which they very well may do--but let's suppose/pretend they don't), do they have anything to gain by reducing the number of followers? I'd personally prefer the number of followers to represent actual people rather than people + fake accounts ... But I bet the upsides to having millions of boosted amounts of followers clearly outweighs the downsides for Smule, from a marketing perspective. So I can see why changing anything in this regard isn't prioritized. 

On 8/4/2022 at 3:32 AM, DuetWithAlli said:

On the flip side, there are also singers who sound like dying cats, yet have 100 times more followers and joins on their songs because they are nice to look at and/or are involved in numerous groups and support chats.

Editing to add: that sounded kind of harsh. As long as singing on Smule makes people happy, I’m happy for them.

Lol, yes, I agree with all of what you said ... There seems to be tons of different ways to use Smule, and as long as it makes people happy I'm fine with it 😁

Speaking of how to spot a good singer etc by looking at figures: Whenever I see a profile with collabs that predominantly have "too many likes" in comparision to how many views/listens the collabs have, I try not to engage with that profile. I'd much rather have friends who click like/heart only when they actually listen to the collab and like it ... not just for the sake of adding another like to the song. A profile with 0-5 likes/hearts on 99% of their collabs feels a lot more authentic to me. But again, that's just how I personally want Smule to work. If others love when their Smule friends regularly go to their profiles and click like/heart on everything since their last visit ... that's up to them 🙂

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@Nathan D absolutely the same for me. On my profile, I usually ask that people don’t blind love my recordings or share to groups and support chats. If I like singing with a person otherwise, I’ll kindly ask them not to share. If I don’t like singing with them anyway, I will block. Just my preference, nothing personal against people who operate this way.

Glad I’m not the only one who suspects that Smule is behind the fake accounts. I am actually kind of offended that Smule is trying to play people like that, and I would totally complain to them. I’d think it would turn people off of the app more than anything, but as you pointed out, Smule sees the numbers from the business side, so I must be wrong.

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It’s pretty normal for social media services to keep suspended (or sometimes even deleted) accounts visible – at least for some time. It has nothing to do with ‘boosting numbers’. It’s about transparency. Because the alternative is even worse: When accounts just disappear from the lists, users freak out even more and they will blame the service for randomly cutting off the connections between users. I know, because our forum is full of such assertions.
When a Facebook friend of mine deactivates their account, they also stay in my Friend list and when I click on them, Facebook explains that their account was deleted, so I know what is going on. Smule does it in a similar way for suspended accounts and deactivated performances (when there are copyright issues). 

All public social media services are plagued with fake accounts and they are actively fighting them, not creating them. This is even more obvious with Smule than with other services, because Smule is about the singing experience. That can’t be faked like Twitter messages from bots. At least I hope we are not suggesting that Smule pays people to actively join songs just so that person keeps their VIP membership. That’s not really a viable business model. 
Without such a scenario, what is left is the fake accounts with no or hardly any songs. As mentioned before, this is unavoidable on all social media services. Smule has lots of protective measures built in against this. But it can only limit the impact, not remove it entirely. After all, Smule must let people register and be active on the app. And so people (or bots acting as if they were people) can and will register with bad intentions. Smule can’t prevent that. They can only limit their actions and that is exactly what is happening. Years ago, it was possible to let bots create tens of thousands of likes/ comments/follows from one account in a day as a way to advertise an account. It was a huge annoyance for millions of Smule users. But now it isn’t possible anymore. Try to create too many likes, comments or follows in a day, and Smule will show a warning and remove your ability to continue these actions for a certain amount of time. We should be happy about that. But there will still be some fake accounts, spam messages and so on. It’s unavoidable. And it always comes from users of the service, not the service itself. That’s why this comparison of ‘celebrity buying followers’ doesn’t work. It’s the users who buy these followers, not the services. The services try to fight this practise, because it ruins the experience for the users and is therefore bad for business. As is obvious from this discussion. We are complaining about the fake accounts. So they are NOT in Smule’s interest. 

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In fact Elon Musk is trying to use that as an excuse to back out of his Twitter acquisition.. bots and fake users😀 They do claim it's only about 5%.. probably similar numbers for smule! At least there aren't as many fake users and bots as their main competitor StarMaker.

I checked and didn't see too many fake followers on my list, although I do see users who haven't been on smule for months or years. Doesn't bother me either way. The people who subscribe to smule for years are the exception - and these are the ones complaining about all the weird changes. Even with lots of new updates the new user interface is still broken and awkward to use in countless ways! Old one was so solid after being debugged for years.

And yeah there's several "dying-cat" types with way too many followers but they are usually joined by other dying cats so who cares😂

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Also completely understandable why a popular singer would block someone who joined them 15 times even if they deleted it. And joins that get hundreds of fake likes/fake comments from group members are the worst, somehow these joins are usually mediocre😝 People have been known to delete joins that get floods of likes to put a stop to the flood.

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@opentype That’s a good reason that I hadn’t considered for Smule leaving the fake accounts alone. I have had people who dropped out of my lists ask me if I unfollowed them, so it probably would create more upset and confusion if fake accounts are removed. I’ll just continue to remove them myself as soon as I see them. 

I’m kind of confused as to how it benefits real users to create fake accounts that then follow other people’s real accounts. And why they would want these fake accounts to send flirty messages to people of the opposite sex. But I guess there a lot of things I don’t understand about how and why people do the things they do on Smule. At this point, I find it best to stick with friends I’ve been singing with for years and be very cautious about letting in anyone new.

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11 hours ago, opentype said:

It’s pretty normal for social media services to keep suspended (or sometimes even deleted) accounts visible – at least for some time. It has nothing to do with ‘boosting numbers’. It’s about transparency. Because the alternative is even worse: When accounts just disappear from the lists, users freak out even more and they will blame the service for randomly cutting off the connections between users.

I hadn't thought of the transparency aspect. Thanks for pointing that out! I will however still argue--although I realize that this is not a top priority for Smule, nor should it be--that a suspended account should not be counted towards the number of followers. Because it's simply not a follower. Even if a real person was behind it, if the account is no longer active, it's no longer following anyone. After having read your post, I agree that it should be kept in the list of followers until the user actively removes them, for the sake of transparency, but maybe grayed out or something to give the user an indication that something is up.

My main issue here is that I sadly can't find any way of removing suspended accounts from my followers list. So I can't tidy my list up the way I would like to. From a programming perspective, I count that as a logical bug. I can't imagine that it's an intentional behaviour. Then again, I didn't see the transparency perspective, so I could of course be overseeing something. But why would Smule let me block active accounts but not suspended accounts? I can't see the point.

When I posted my first post in this thread, I just wanted to see if anyone else had found a way to block suspended accounts. Because if there is a way, I would really like to use it. Nobody else but me would ever care about my list being tidy... but like I indicated, I have way too much time on my hands.

I disagree with one thing (and one thing only) in your post, @opentype. I'm sure that there are indeed Smule users who are happy about fake accounts following them, for the sake of boosting their numbers. And I don't think that the number of users who feel this way is negligible because then Smule would be a very unusual social media platform. Having many followers on social media is (as we are all aware) generally something people strive for. And that definitely should be part of the business model for the companies who are behind the platforms. Anything else would be a strange business model (in my opinion).

That doesn't mean that Smule users who are happy to get more followers, not really worrying about whether they are real or not, are actively creating fake accounts themselves or encouraging anyone else to do it. I just think they genuinely don't mind seeing their numbers go up. 

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3 hours ago, realyquick said:

Also completely understandable why a popular singer would block someone who joined them 15 times even if they deleted it. And joins that get hundreds of fake likes/fake comments from group members are the worst, somehow these joins are usually mediocre😝 People have been known to delete joins that get floods of likes to put a stop to the flood.

Oh, something else just occurred to me. I don’t allow Smule to send notifications, and only see the activity on my account when I open the app. But if a person has notifications for Smule turned on, it would get hella annoying when (if?) they get pinged for someone joining a song 15 times in succession. Since I have it turned off, I’m not sure if that’s something you get a notification for anyway. But it’s a possibility.

Edited Wednesday at 06:50 PM by DuetWithAlli

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5 hours ago, Nathan D said:

My main issue here is that I sadly can't find any way of removing suspended accounts from my followers list.

I would like to find a way, too. I am not a 10-year-old so I don’t care about the numbers. It would be extremely nice of Smule to rid all of the fake suspended accounts that we no longer can bump. I miss the bump. The only way to rid the fakes is to bump them as soon as they begin following, but I can’t monitor my account 24/7 and I wouldn’t think too many users can. The longer the fake accounts stay they eventually get suspended and the bump feature no longer works.