Facebook has found the solution to fight plagiarism and spam and I look forward to see something similar on Steem
From my own experience, I can say that almost any social network that I access or accessed in the past is or has been subjected to the negative effects of plagiarism and spam. Two kinds of mold that not only "spoil the taste" of a news feed for those who really care about this, but that also affects the image of that platform over time. Facebook, although it's no longer a platform I'm actively on, recently found a solution to combat plagiarism and spam at the same time, according to a recent TechCrunch article.
If you have or have ever had a Facebook account, you definitely know that every time you open the app "you're hit" by the news feed. Something similar to Steemit's "my feed," in case you did not have Facebook ever. This news feed generally serves your newest stuff, with the best from your friends night out to all sorts of news, recipes and more or less original materials that one might share. Of all this, what I have listed and which are considered to be the mold of a Facebook feed, the platform decided to fight against plagiarism and monetizing it. So it created an algorithm that checks for news and other type of articles shared and scans and compares their text with other publications found online. If the text corresponds totally to other publications, or even a very high percentage of it, then that link will appear very low in the news feed or it will not appear at all to stop monetizing plagiarized content and promoting it.
One such example of how this type plagiarism works on Facebook gave the author of the article mentioned above when one old article of his was simply copied by a Nigerian online outlet which further shared it and attached numerous advertisements to it, earning on the back of another person who has nothing to do with them. Having set up an algorithm to combat Facebook plagiarism seems to go in the direction of a cleaner platform for Facebook which seems to start caring about its users. Which I'd like to see on Steemit also.
With Steemit, however, there is another story. Here we "live" in a decentralized world in which anyone can do almost anything because ... yes, we are not centralized and that's good as long as users understand that freedom also involves responsibilities. However, some people who just want to earn Steem tokens would do anything for this and in some cases the system allows them to do that even if it's plagiarized content that we're talking about. For example, if someone is copying a word by word text and is publishing it on Steem it will be detected and punished by cheetah and steemcleaners, but for now as far as I know, there is not no algorithm or bot to detect stolen videos from youtube or photos from google that can also be monetized in Steem and go into the same category of plagiarism.
There are enough examples of such plagiarized content and just two days ago I saw such a post that led me to its author's blog where there were others similar ones. I did not give him a flag, but it definitely disgusted me because he also used some small amounts of Steem to buy some bots for a few posts. Bots that upvoted the posts with absolutely no complaint and served the guy some rewards out of the rewards pool that we all "have the right to" even if not all of us take Steem out of it using stolen content.
At the same time whales that are supposed to "fight for the good of the platform" have decided to flag each other and destroy their reputation to feed their big egos, but they think it's for the better of Steem and its users. It's their voting power after all and they do what they want with it, but if I had such a huge amount of SP I would use it to sweep away the scrap of plagiarism and spam and reward users who bring real value and traffic to the platform. Killing spam and plagiarism and encouraging hard working bloggers I see as a better way to help Steem become a top social media platform and Steem a top 10 cryptocurrency.
Thanks for your attention
While I welcome attempts to ensure quality original content is promoted above spammed plagiarism I suspect the Facebook algorithm change has more to do with censorship than promoting good quality content. Facebook centrally control all data and earn money from advertisements so I doubt 'tackling spam' is their priority. Tackling low quality spam perhaps, but monetising your home feed, and selling your data, is their primary business model. I believe any such move by facebook will be used to silence anyone sharing articles, news media and opinion pieces they don't want you to see. Facebook is rapidly becoming a tool for political propaganda and state censorship of freedom of speech. Given that DARPA closed their own similar social media project called Lifelog the day that Facebook launched, I suspect this was always the intention once enough members of the public were caught in it's clutches. I truly hope that is not something Steemit will seek to emulate.
Facebook may probably censor some other type of material also with their new algorithm and I am inclined also to believe that Facebook is also "* a tool for political propaganda*", but the idea of creating an algorithm for fighting spam and plagiarism is what I applause at them. I don't want Steem to become a new Facebook, but I don't want Steem o become a paradise of spam and plagiarism either. I like Steem a lot, I am spending a good amount of time being active here every day, but it still has some work to do with some of its flaws.
We don't want censorship on steem, I believe the current approach with steemcleaners, chetah etc is the right approach.
I don't want censorship either, but I feel the same about spam and plagiarism and I don't like spammers at all.
@acesontop Thank you for not using bidbots on this post and also using the #nobidbot tag!