To Flag Or Not To Flag? That's the Question...

in #busy7 years ago

♫ ♫ I flagged a guy and I liked i-it ... ♫♫
I'm not the 'flagger'-type, but I found out that there are things you simply can't ignore...

to flag or not to glag.jpg

Copycats

While I was scrolling through the 'cryptocurrency' tag stream yesterday, opening some posts that looked promising, I couldn't help noticing that the Cheetah bot is working overtime these days. Apparently, it is a new trend to just copy an article published on a big news site, and use it as a SteemIt post.

Image source at the bottom of the post

But Cheetah is smart: she uncovers all of those posts in no time, leaving a short, informative message that states that duplicate content has been detected.

According to @anyx, the creator of the Cheetah bot, the comment is for informative purposes only.
It is supposed to make the author aware that he should not be copy/pasting, but it is also meant as a warning towards the reader that the article might be plagiarism, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether to upvote or not.

You can find out more about how Cheetah works in this article

If the user keeps posting copy/paste content, this will be investigated by Steemcleaners, who can decide to put someone on the blacklist or not.

It's not yet clear to me how Cheetah and Steemcleaners handle a situation where a user consistently posts articles from news sites but always adds a link to the source, but I'm trying to find that out.

I'll tell you more about Steemcleaners below.

Spam, Actual & Real Spam


While I was reading a couple of posts, I noticed that someone had posted an identical, off-topic comment underneath every single one of those posts. The comment was just a plain promotion for some token and the poster didn't even try to hide his affiliate link.


When I checked out his account, I discovered he had posted the same comment more than 20 times in 1 hour.

These last few weeks, we have been discussing whether low-quality comments like 'Thanks! Please follow' should be considered to be spam or not, but looking at what this guy did, I instantly realized we have been waisting our precious time.

This was 'the real thing' - these comments had the word SPAM written all over them...

Flagging



Ever since I signed up for SteemIt I had been hearing about flagging. Some people promote it, other people think it's a bad idea.

I had never flagged anything myself, but when I saw this shameless spamming I thought that if there ever would be a good time to flag, this would be it.

So I clicked the little flag icon next to the comment and this popup appeared:

flag warning.jpg

Clear enough, I thought and I clicked the 'FLAG' button. I went over to his second comment and flagged that too. Fortunately, there was this little voice in my head saying there was no need to flag all of his comments.

I'm glad I listened to that little voice because what the popup doesn't tell you is that flagging a post depletes your voting power at the same rate as upvoting at 100%!

I think it's more important to reward someone for writing a great post with an upvote than to spend my precious Voting Power on those spammers.

As a result, flagging is off the table.

But reporting abuse is not!


SteemCleaners



I started doing some research on SteemCleaners.

Image source at the bottom of the post
I already knew that the Steemcleaners are a group of volunteers who are trying to keep SteemIt free from plagiarism, spam, identity theft and all other malicious practices. They work together with the Cheetah bot to fight all forms of abuse.


The Steemcleaners account publishes a public log of cases every week, and they're even rewarding people that help them to fight abuse.

We offer a subjective reward system for members and reputable abuse hunters in the community -- rewards given from donors, and upvotes on the weekly logs or announcement posts, will be grouped into a “pie”, and group members will vote on a distribution of the reward. Steem power in the account will remain, to improve our ability to flag clear abuse. Even as a non-member, you can receive part of the reward if you consistently help us fight abuse!
@steemcleaners



To participate in the war against abuse you can use the abuse reporting form on their website.

form.png
Click to enlarge

Before you start reporting abuse, it's important you read the Abuse Guide first.

In this guide is stated what is considered to be abuse and what not. You should make yourself familiar with this info, so you won't make the mistake of abusing the abuse reporting form.

GOOD TO KNOW: When you submit the form, and you want to make a chance on being rewarded, you're required to fill in your username in the first two fields. There's no need to worry about this. Your username will not be made public - it is for internal use only.

You can also find and contact the Steemcleaners on their Discord channel or on SteemIt chat.

Chat Channels:
#Steemcleaners-public - use this channel to talk to the public steemcleaner members about the group

#SteemItAbuse - use this channel to discuss all forms of abuse on Steemit.com.

#SteemItAbuse-Appeals - use this channel to submit an appeal if you have been downvoted by Steemcleaners of been blacklisted by Cheetah.


Please note that all reporting should be done by sending the abuse reporting form on the website.



I'll be showing you how you can avoid being tagged by Cheetah in one of my next posts.

Do You Flag Or Not? Let Me Know Why (Not)!


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Image Sources:
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I am a guest curator from the Whaleshares Curation Team. I have selected your post to be presented in a live curation discussion todat. Your post will be awarded with a 100 Whaleshares vote on the night. I do hope you can come along and spectate. The event will be held in The Curation Lounge on the Whaleshares server. Here's a link which explains things: https://steemit.com/steemit/@nikflossus/the-13th-whaleshares-curation-show-featuring-patricklancaster-tomorrow-night

Wow! Thanks! What an honour. i’ll try to attend, but it will be 1am here in Belgium. Can you please explain a bit more? I don’t really get the idea by reading the post you sent me... :0/

Yes, thanks for that jingle! I too flagged a user just the other day and felt good about it (and did it with a 100% vote). I did so after I discovered they were using 5 different accounts strictly for the purpose of upvoting and promoting each other. To me, they were attempting to rape the rewards pool. I'm not someone who likes flagging but in this case, I felt somebody had to. I didn't know about @steemcleaners at the time but will check them out. Here is a link to my post describing my assault on this spammer. Someone please tell me if I was wrong. (resteemed)

This post has received a 6.92 % upvote from @aksdwi thanks to: @simplymike.

Thanks for sharing this information with us. We really appreciate it. Some will say flagging is a sign of violence, but done correctly can actually be beneficial and educationing.

What a great article. I too like your starting jingle. You taught me about flagging. I know we should utilize the tool more. Or Steemitcleaners. I have never tried it but did learn how to through you! I usually just skip the spam stuff but not taking action is just as bad. Sigh. Will have to try it out one of these days. I hate to hate but outright plagiarizing or spamming brings down this community.

Good luck with the contest!!!

This post has received a 34.77 % upvote from @sleeplesswhale thanks to: @simplymike.

I'm so glad you started the post that way. Except now I have that song stuck in my head.
Yeah, it depletes at the same rate, but if you have the slider bar you can flag at a lower percentage as s warning. Thanks for trying to help reduce spam on here. Steemcleaners does great work, but they can't do it alone.

I second that. Wondering how the rest of the song would go.

You got upvoted from @adriatik bot! Thank you to you for using our service. We really hope this will hope to promote your quality content!

You got a 35.15% upvote from @mercurybot courtesy of @simplymike!

This post has received a 66.67 % upvote from @siditech thanks to: @simplymike. Here's a banana! banana-small.png

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