Since you can earn rewards on your blogs posts, there are many ways people try to abuse the system.

The long time users and those that are building this platform understand how important it is for user growth and retention. One method of helping in those terms is welcoming new users on the platform by upvoting an introduction post. Most are amazed how much they earn and feel welcomed to the community. Some users take advantage and create alternate accounts just to put out a fake introduction post to earn a larger reward and mislead those that are helping this platform.

Many of you seen this stuff already but those of you that haven't, here's what it might look like:

Usually, it's a form of identity theft where these type of abusers will take photos from another social media platform and post it on Steem and play it off as if it was them. This one happens to be taken from another Steemian @sylvia1997.

^{https://steemit.com/@sylviaa}

I caught this account on the very first post where they had used another photo with terrible a photoshop of a person holding up a fake Steemit sign. There were many other photos used and I commented with the source of one of the photos. I downvoted this user, left a comment stating they look exactly like someone else and they had deleted the first post and try to post the exact same one again and I left the same comment. Then as you can see from the image above, they used a different photo of a user on Steemit.

You can see the original first two posts here:

https://phist.steemdata.com/history?identifier=steemit.com/introduceyourself/@sylviaa/my-introduction-and-first-post-as-a-steemian-the-life-of-a-young-singaporean-and-his-journey-of-photography-food

https://phist.steemdata.com/history?identifier=steemit.com/introduceyourself/@sylviaa/xuexr-my-introduction-and-first-post-as-a-steemian-the-life-of-a-young-singaporean-and-his-journey-of-photography-food

It seems some of the image links ended up being forbidden but you can still see the type of scamming and abusing that goes on with this introduction post.

Be Responsible With Your Voting.

With the use of voting bots, it's understandable why many of these types of posts receive votes. Bots are helpful to spread rewards but at the same time, it contributes to the problem we have with spam and scammers receiving some of the rewards being distributed.

Many users don't use voting bots and they still are fooled by these types of posts or, they don't really read or look at the post and end up upvoting it. It is up to us to have the right type of content rewarded and that's to actually use the platform and spend time viewing content. There are great bloggers that earn the reputation of being consistent with their blogging and receive consistent support from accounts that use bots. I don't see an issue with that but being careless and upvoting for content like the one shown earlier dealing with ID theft, can give a bad impression to other users and the overall quality of this platform.

@steemcleaners

There are mix views on this project but has been around since the early days of Steem. Some see it as a spamming bot that is taking from the reward pool and technically it is, but it's something that is needed. It's something like fighting fire with fire. Without @steemcleaners, the Steem platform would be filled with a whole lot more abuse. The rewards that steemcleaners receive do get distributed to users that do go out and look for abuse like the one I mentioned earlier in the post on ID theft. They helped with making sure that account does not receive rewards.

Since the userbase is growing, there is only so much abuse @steemcleaners can catch. It's up to us to do our part in helping minimize this type of abuse.

Let's all work together, be a bit more responsible with our voting, and have this platform be a great place for real content creators.

Image Sources: 1,2,3

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Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Feel free to follow and find me in SteemSpeak on Discord.