@pjheinz thanks for doing the analysis. Transparency is absolutely necessary.
Personally, I am a bit conflicted about how to react. The reality is Steemit needs some kind of plagiarism bot to prevent abuse and potential issues with DCMA violations, and that bot will require funding to operate, maintain and upgrade. Most programmers will not contribute their skills for free.
Even if we put aside the issues of whether or not a government entity can and should enforce DCMA regs, or even the issue of intellectual property rights, we would be having the same debate about reward pool theft when the copy/paste nonsense begins again and becomes as bad or worse just like it was when Steemit first began last year.
I do agree with your position as it relates to how much is being taken by the self-upvoting, but that issue extends much further than STEEM cleaners and cheetah. How many now are engaged with their bot trains in self upvoting comments?
@patrice mentions it in her response, but to find out why steemcleaners switched to upvoting comments I would recommend looking at this post from transisto and especially the response from anyx.
Basically even though people want to support steemcleaners there are those out there that don't want to see the reports on the trending page. This does make some sense, you want to lead with your best foot forward and a big list of people plagiarizing stuff isn't ideal.
Switching to upvoting comments keeps the reports off the trending page and has a few added benefits as well. It prevents steemcleaner comments from being flagged and having their visibility removed and it also moves them near the top of a post so that people can have all the information before they vote on a potentially plagiarized post.
@fingolfin it makes sense to keep the @steemcleaners of the trending page, so the comment upvoting would be the best way to do that. I can remember when I joined in July what a mess the plagiarism was on Stemit and @anyx was fronting the entire cost of @cheetah out of his own pockets to provide a basic service I would have expected Steemit, Inc would have taken on in light of DCMA issues.
I remember @curie was being pilloried for upvoting their own update posts to the trending page , and the whole "reward pool theft" hate-rants towards Curie were filling the trending page for obscene rewards. In the end, the Curie project opted to refuse payouts on every other post and assume a huge amount of automation. Have @steemcleaners and @cheetah considered a similar approach?
Like fubar said, we can't really automate anything else easily. In this post anyx discusses the costs of running cheetah, I recall him saying that trying to create something to find plagiarized photos would astronomically expensive.
People complain about bots enough as it is. Steemcleaners is not a bot, every post, every comment that the steemcleaners account makes is made by a person. Every post is investigated, commented on, reviewed, and logged by a person and that takes a lot of time and effort. The money made is going right back to all the members of the community(steemcleaners or not) who identify and report abuse. Most of us even use our personal accounts voting power to deal with these issues as well, despite the risk of retaliation. Hell, look at my account, I'm no whale. I use my meager voting power to take care of small issues to save steemcleaners voting power for the really big ones.
You can't automate what we do. If you notice cheetah can miss a lot and there is no easy way to automate photo plg detection. For everything you automate someone will find a way to avoid that automatic detection. It takes human and lots of time.
Curie also has the benifit of voting for curation profit. Something steemcleaners can't do. You see we are getting grilled for 4% upvotes on our comments and most of our voting power goes to flagging which gives no curation rewards.
Very true, these guys are making steemit the most censored and centralized social media site in the world. We need to follow their morals and their religious cult if we have to survive here.
Cheetah posts the same damn thing in every post and these guys and their friends upvote the cheetah comment for rewards