Food for Thought Friday: Copyright & Content Cleaners?

I had a great chat with @alexpmorris and @matt-a today on the whaleshare’s discord. We discussed lots of important aspects of steem and the community moving forward along with helping me answer various questions I had as a newbie to this platform. After a few hours of discussion Alex brought up a point that I thoroughly agreed with and thought it was important to share my input on the subject as well.

The majority of users who discover steemit are driven to this site not only because of the cryptocurrency STEEM, but also because it rewards it's users for the content they contribute. As this platform is picking up speed and starts to gain more mainstream popularity, some people are creating accounts with the sole intention of earning easy money. Unfortunately some of these people dont have any concept of steem/blockchain and the revolution it's turning into.

Users who supported the platform before the surge saw the potential and genuinely enjoyed getting involved in the community. They came for the rewards and stayed for the community. The one thing that scares me looking towards the future is the accounts that only have one goal in mind: upvotes. Accounts like this that spam random posts all day clogging the New feed on the mainpage and under tags. If no one is filtering out these spam accounts, then the minnows who post quality content are becoming harder to discover.
As a newbie on this platform it’s worrisome to me that the main place that I use help to leverage discovery is going to gain a bad reputation from the curators. If no one is filtering out the copy and pasted content, the new users with quality content are going to get harder and harder to discover. All these incredible accounts with original posts aren’t going to be able to stand out against the outpour of accounts who constantly spam memes/images from google or copyrighted content.

In all seriousness though, I feel that this is a very important issue that is going to have to be addressed, and luckily we're still only in Steemit beta. I believe that with proper curating and a strong community this could become one of the best mainstream social media websites of our generation. The way that I look at it is we, as a decentralized community, have the all the power to change what we think needs changing.

Generally if there is an issue that arises on other platforms such as reddit, the moderators are in charge of removing comments/posts that don't follow the community guidelines. I think steemit in need of someone to filter out all the copyrighted crap. I think we should vote a group of active volunteers who moderates content that has be flagged. If the general consensus believes that a moderator is deserving of the role then they can be allocated power, and if the general consensus don't believe they're allocating their power fairly then I think the community should be able to revoke that power as well.

The same way that your local grocery store has a employee dressed in normal clothes who’s job is to walk around keeping their eye out for shoplifters, we need a content cop or a content cleaner per se. A group of people who believe this platform is revolutionary and want to make sure it stays on course towards the right direction. There are a lot of incredible, original posts out there that deserved to be seen.

Unfortunately I’m only a minnow and I am far away from having the power to be able to create such a group. As an individual on this platform though I do have a voice, and if my voice is loud enough then maybe, just maybe I can help be apart of the change.

Just some food for thought. ;)

Hope everyone has a lovely Friday and a wonderful weekend. If anyone has any good music they want to share for Mixtape Monday next week, please leave your suggestions on last weeks Mixtape Monday post.

xx,

Lauren