Blacklisted Plagiarizer Cries Foul - Here's the whole story...
Removable Rewards
I posted yesterday about @johnsil and suggested the rewards be removed from those plagiarized posts. From there, the story gets good so let's get to the details.
First off, this account is very new.
Like most of us, this account saw few votes and almost no rewards whatsover after the first couple posts. Then came the transfers.
About 10 SBD and 10 STEEM. This was then used for the upvote bots, which have all of the recent posts on this account showing pretty good pending rewards.
Blacklisting
The issue is that every single post by this account is plagiarism. These are mostly recipes and there is some minor changes to the copy so it is not a strict copy/paste, but the image is clearly stolen from the original post and the recepies are pretty much word for word.
After reviewing these posts, I saw some were using @buildawhale and having seen the very active work against spammers by @buildawhale I reached to to advise of this account. And I was glad to see the rewards were removed!
Unfortunately, @johnsil was not so glad and sent a transfer with this memo.
Even better, @buildawhale decided to blacklist @johnsil who then replied in protest and @themarkymark summed it up perfectly.
And finally came the motivation for this post, a new post about the unfairness of the blacklisting.
Normally, I wouldn't commit so much time but these rewards are considerable so I walked back the last 10 posts and I found all of them online, proving these are all plagiarism. I've put these all in a table below so you can directly verify this.
So, @johnsil asks, "WHY BUILDAWHALE ADDED ME TO HIS BLACKLIST" and the answer is clear.
We don't vote plagiarists.
Other Upvote Bots
Do other upvote bots vote plagiarists?
It's clear that @buildawhale doesn't vote plagiarists, but I'm curious about the other bot owners. I know this is a hot topic today so I'd be extremely intersted to see which of the other bot owners are willing to reject obvious plagiarism.
To these bot owners, on behalf of the community--and the rewards pool!--I am begging you to consider removing your votes on the active posts for the @johnsil account.
I did a review of these posts and here's a full accounting of all the upvote bots I'm seeing. If you know how to contact any of these bot owners please direct them to this post.
@bid4joy
@booster
@brupvoter
@ebargains
@emperorofnaps
@fishbaitbot
@gangresteem
@honestbot
@inciter
@jerrybanfield
@johnsil
@mercurybot
@minnowbooster
@minnowvotes
@nado.bot
@postpromoter
@promobot
@puppybot
@seakraken
@smartmarket
@smartsteem
@sneaky-ninja
@spydo
@therising
@upme
@upmewhale
@upmyvote
Spams accounts are usually degenerate but we'll still continue to blacklist them. I can take into account for @appreciator and @inciter only.
I sincerely appreciate the reply and the blacklisting! Would you also consider removing those votes that have not yet paid out?
You forgot to mention the "synonym replacement" technique, unless I missed it....I have another term for it, but it isn't quite as apt. Still think some of those posts were online personality quiz results 😺
Now this is hilarious. When I started, I had...
Synonym Replacement
...as a headline like this and the more I wrote the more confusing it got, so I distilled it down to this.
I think a lot of it might have been cycled through a language translator a few times, which would explain the odd syntax and word replacement. I don't get why the user wouldn't just replace the posts with some tedious original content and farm the bot votes - of course it's a bit late for that now......
And...... it just gets better.....https://steemit.com/@johnsil/transfers
The unvotes have begun! I hope this trend continues...
This was interesting to see. I'll take that as a positive sign!