Going to War On STEEM #2 : Into The Trenches We Go
I wasn’t sure how this was going to play out. I guess I hoped the Abuser would see the error of their ways and reform. It was probably naïve of me to even hope for this outcome. Reality usually kicks in at some point and we just do our best to make a positive impact. Here is my story so far and it’s definitely been a learning experience! I write today in the hope that others might learn from my experience.
Source
As I stated was my original intention, I was waiting for my Delegation to come back for a couple of days after my War Declaration so the first thing I did was to turn off my SteemVoter so that I could charge up some Voting Power (apologies once again to all those authors who I normally support). Then when my Delegation came back I started Downvoting all those meaningless self-voted comments to zero, or as close as I could get to it. I always posted a comment below so that others could see my explanation and there were a couple of users who joined me in pushing the comments to zero, or even making them disappear.
I thought that was a decent opening salvo and when they finally started responding to my comments and promised “I will do the right job now….I am very sorry” I thought there might be some genuine remorse and reform on the way. My optimism was short lived. The next day they threw out a couple of token 10% votes onto others posts and the self-voting at 100% resumed. Not good enough, so I started flagging the comments again at which point the Abuser suggested they would get Jerry Banfield to back them up. After I finished laughing, I welcomed the chance to explain to Jerry how they had been abusing the system. No word from Jerry yet.
I had always intended to leave the actual posts of this Abuser alone because they seemed to contain some genuine content. The Abuser has a reputation of 56, which is not low but when I saw them use the minnowsupport bot to upvote a post (which I have Delegated to for many months) I realised they were a member of the Minnow Support Project! Oops! So I made some enquiries about whether I might have been out of line, or whether this user should actually be Blacklisted from the upvote bot. I was considering pulling my Delegation but the response was that this user was guilty of “Spun Content / Plagiarism” and they were Blacklisted from using the MSP bots. Another small victory.
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I actually hadn’t heard this term “Spun Content” before so I did a bit of a search. Content Spinning is a technique used for Search Engine Optimisation to replace common/similar words to make it more unique. In order words – on STEEM it can get you past the cheetah bot. So the next stop was at Steemcleaners where I enquired whether Spun Content was considered a form of plagiarism and if so, how to detect it. This sent me on a Google trip for a while as I now sensed that not only was the user abusing by self-voting 100% and plagiarising sentences from posts for the purpose of self-voting comments, but I now felt it was highly likely that the posts I had been leaving alone might also be totally copied.
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Sure enough after a bit of digging I found the original articles written in Hindi. This abuser had been using a basic translator (probably Google Translate) to convert other peoples work and repost as their own. So after figuring this out I submitted reports to Steemcleaners and BANG, those articles were zero’ed. But that’s not the end of the story of course.
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Today they have posted 4 new articles, again using a bid-bot to boost rewards and again it looks like they are plagiarised articles. So they don’t seem to have learned, or reformed at all. They are probably just going to change up their abuse technique a bit and it’ll take me more effort to stay on top of them than it’ll take them to churn out more plagiarism. Good guys lose again? Maybe I should just let it go, but that feels a bit like giving up on STEEM and I’m not quite ready to do that.
https://www.businessinsider.com.au
http://minnowsupportproject.org
https://steemcleaners.org
I had a look at this person's blog. They describe themselves as an affiliate marketer. If they are an affiliate marketer, then I would say they are very familiar with article spinning software.
Their articles read like spun content. It's hard to prove as they could be using paragraphs from different articles and splicing them together.
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EDIT: I see you got them. How did you find the originals?
Good point.
I don't want to give too much away because I am expecting they will just get more sophisticated. If they know how I found them then they'll make sure it's harder to find next time.
and there so many of them in steemit. in their brains it's ''easy and fast money'' but they don't see the bigger picture
Agreed. I guess this is the existential question I am having on STEEM. Is it just accepted that this is the way it is? I know it's not a black and white issue but I'm trying to work out what shade of grey is prevalent and whether that's good enough.
I was really encouraged by the MSP and Steemcleaners responses but I still can't decide whether I should be powering up or powering down. I don't like to invest time and money into a cause if it's lost. Been there done that.
my point of view in this is that @ned should do something about it. we just can't deal with all of this. i know there are some things that we can do like some flags or what you did but that's not gonna solve the issue it's like you bust the drug addicts or some street drug dealers while the druglords are safe and sound.
After all of this it's not like i am gonna quit steemit but it's not one of the my top priorities either
While I understand your sentiment, we can't look to some central authority to solve this or we end up no better than facebook. We actually need to solve this together as a community if we are ever going to be able to properly self-govern.
now what's left is to unite as community :P
Well done man, looks like your using your computer skills for good. Awesome job cleaning up some riff raff, keep it up.
Thanks for doing your part about this. Isn't it easier to report to steemcleaners? It really feels like there needs to be some serious structural changes to fix some of this. The same with the flashing war that is going on. The moment you let the pressure go, they will just go back to doing the same thing.
I did report to steemcleaners though they have a set mandate so some forms of abuse are outside that and I have not succeeded in getting the abuser blacklisted by steemcleaners.
Sorry, I missed that bit of your post. Weird that translated almost plagiarism isn't accepted.
Fingers crossed that they'll get the idea eventually if you keep it up. It sounds very time consuming for you though.
Just an after thought, is there any chance the original work could be hers and she's just translating it for here?
I did consider that possibility but once I pulled down 6 or so original articles from 4 different authors I thought that was proof enough this wasn't their own work.
Glad you were thorough. It's a shame to see people profiting from others hard work. I see her account value is higher than mine and she joined after me. Knowing the hours I put into some of my posts that's disappointing to see. So all I can say is thank you for taking the time to dig out accounts like this.
Have you told @discordiant about this person? He can add him/her to the blacklist for the MSP bot.
He probably uses ginabot and will see me tagging him in this comment.
This user was spotted a while back and added then.
I did look for @discordiant first, but they were not online at the time I raised it. I believe they are now no longer able to use any of the MSP bots.
Drop me a DM at any time, I rarely show as online on Discord.
Ok, good to know. Thanks for the offer. I'll take you up on it next time!
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Almost a carbon copy Modus Operandi :-