I've mentioned this in another post but it is worth repeating here. The steemcleaners aren't an official part of steemit, its a group of volunteers. The funds raised go to removing the payouts from plagiarized posts, helping to fund the operation of the cheetah bot, and rewarding the users/members of the group who spend hours looking for plagiarized posts.
I'd like to think that every steemian would voluntarily donate their time and precious voting power to fight abuse without any monetary incentive but alas that isn't the case. The amount of plagiarized posts on steemit is staggering and it takes a ton of voting power to remove all of those payouts. Go look at a steemcleaners log post and look how many posts that are downvoted. All of those removed payouts are steem that is going back in the pool to go to deserving members instead of plagiarists and scammers.
Hmm...well I still consider myself to be a newb. My questions are:
How can anyone tell if it's a bot?
If it's a bot, do you think it should still make a profit?
What set of rules are used to determine if someone plagiarized? Sounds like some of the comments here are saying that they have been unfairly "flagged" when they did nothing wrong. How is that corrected if true?
Well, as far as steemcleaners goes, you can tell if its a bot by reading this post which gives a list of handy frequently asked questions that people have.
You can also tell its not a bot by the amount of actual people on this thread who are a part of steemcleaners telling you its not a bot, that we are just people lol.
Should bots make profit? It depends on the bot- Do you think fighting plagiarism is a worthy cause on steemit? If so, that is cheetahs main function and in order to run it needs to be funded. Do I think the @iliketoast bot or @ionlysaymeep need to profit? That's a matter of personal opinion, I mean I like toast but I'm not sure how much of a payout that thing actually warrants.
As far as what set of rules are used? A good starting point would be this post which outlines what we tend to consider abuse.
Obviously there will be disagreement, as community based volunteers we tend to listen to the feedback we are receiving. For example, an early point of contention was people who simply repost a youtube video without any additional text, commentary, etc.. just a straight link to a youtube video being posted dozens of times a day. At first we considered this spam because where is the effort in just reposting dozens of videos? What does it add? But it became clear that people were really pushing back against this so we let it go now.
Lately the issue seems to be mainly over affiliate and referral links with people split on what is acceptable and when does it become spam.
Well, I'm curious about citations. How do you know if something I'm writing is original or if I simply did a "copy/paste" from another article? That would be a tremendous amount of time for an individual to do google searches for chunks of your sentences to see if it matches another article. Something like that is most efficiently done by a bot.
And then you get into murky areas where, what if I'm not doing a copy/paste from another post I made on my other blog, but I'm still borrowing my own ideas? And if it's my own photo that I took, am I supposed to state that somewhere?
I'm not too worried about "spam" because I can simply "mute" them and I'll never worry about that again.
Also, thanks for trying to clear this up for me :-)
No problem, and luckily all your questions are easily answered. Cheetah is indeed a bot that does just that, scours the internet for text that is copied and pasted. When it detects a match, instead of flagging it, it gives you this message-
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:(link to the post with the same text).
If you are borrowing from your own blog on a regular basis all you have to do is send a message to cheetah that shows you own the other blog and you can be whitelisted so that cheetah ignores those posts coming from that site.Keep in mind, cheetah doesn't flag any of these posts, it just lets the reader know that this material is posted somewhere else online. The bot can't give any context to the situation, thats why we have actual people who run steemcleaners to look at every post before taking any action.
Unfortunately cheetah doesn't catch everything so you are correct, it IS a tremendous amount of effort for the volunteers of steemcleaners who spend their time googling chunks of text to find copied/spun material, doing reverse image searches on plagiarized photos, and using google translate to find all the foreign articles that cheetah cant find, etc..
As far as photos go, sure, if you took the photos on your post simply state that in the post. If you didn't take the photos you use in your post, just link to the source of where they came from. There plenty of sites out there like pixabay that have a ton of photos to use for free.
Steemcleaners generally won't police a few images in a post, even unsourced, so long as they aren't the entirety of the post. If, however, you are posting in the photography tab and trying to pass of photos as your own that are clearly not yours then you can expect a comment.
So, even if I provide a citation for a post, I'm still going to get cheetah paying me a visit, thus getting on someone's radar. Correct?
Initially, it's not being used to call you a cheater (or cheetah...I'm sure this is a slight play-on-words)...but it's your way of "tagging" someone's post for inspection. Correct?
I'm asking because I've cited other news stories before and provided the links to them. And maybe an hour later I get a little visit from cheetah.
Cheetah is just a bot, it doesn't know the context of your post. So long as enough of it is copied from somewhere else cheetah will stop in and comment on it.
Correct, you are not being called a cheater or flagged by cheetah. In order to avoid cheetah you would ideally be writing completely original content, but just because cheetah does comment on your post it doesn't mean that you have done anything wrong.
This makes me very, very sad. I understand the DMCA/Plagiarism striker, but shouldn't the Admins of Steemit operate something like that? To keep the reward pool equally accessible to all? Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but I don't like the idea of spamming then self-upvoting your own posts.
I had seen a list of users who do nearly the same thing, using their obscene vote power to upvote all of their own posts and comments.
Some might say that's just human nature, but I believe greed and egocentrists are learned behaviors.
Hopefully my response, the response from patrice, and the comments from anyx on this post help to give you an idea of why the votes are cast the way they are.
As @orionsbelt mentioned, this a decentralized platform. There is literally nobody who works for steemit that does anything in an official capacity to fight plagiarism or abuse on the platform, it is all done by volunteers.
Edit: upvoting my own post because pjheinz flagged my last one without giving a reason, better safe than sorry with this one :)
I appreciate the open discussion, you'll notice that I haven't flagged you in retaliation because that really doesn't get us anywhere, even though you have flagged 2 of my comments now.
I was answering @lpfaust and his comment asking for more transparency by trying to provide him with more transparency. I am also trying to clear up some misinformation, mainly the fact that you keep calling steemcleaners a bot. As I mentioned in other comments we are not a bot, literally just a group of people.
As far as the blacklist bot goes, I have no idea who runs it but it isn't steemcleaners or anyx. As far as I can tell it just follows cheetah or steemcleaner flags but we have no control over it and frankly no idea who does.
There are no "admins" of steemit, this is decentralized platform working on consensus from witnesses(who keep blockchain alive), if someone should look into this issue then it should be the "witnesses"
Some ppl on steemit show off themselves as golden caped knights, but all they do is loot, loot and loot! Abuse their powers, downvoting ppl they don't like. We should really investigate properly before supporting these kind of guys.
Where the heck do you get your figures? They are so far off base it isn't even funny.
Steemcleaners $600 a day? Maybe for a week right after hard fork 19 when the rewards were out of whack. Lately we have been lucky to get $200 a day $100 from the daily log and $100 from the comments. Sure we get more if the log is huge and we have to split it into 2 parts.
240 comments a day? They might have been the record for one day but for months there were less than 50 a day usually between 10 and 30. Even if you do the math it comes out nowhere near your figures. 15304 posts over almost a year that's under 45 posts a day average. That's posts and comments combined.
As for the rest of your math it isn't even close to reality. You take no account of the value of steem which was as low as 6 cents for quite awhile.
It's perfectly clear you will do anything to skew your numbers in favor of your argument.
What's crazy is have never seen a post of mine reach over 7 bucks and was only one post. And the only one but hey I'm grateful for the small shares. I could be doing this same thing on Facebook or any other site for free. Only been here a month and a half and imma keep pushing forward.
Wow my friend I'm applauded by your eagerness to bring a real issue to the forefront. Keep one thing in mind though, like every new trending thing it get abused.
One profits from the vast majority while the majority is truest responsible for the work. Sounds exactly like society's selfish tactics. WHO ARE WE TO JUDGE? We are the people and can take action as a whole yet we individually still have some of the same tendencies.
Seems to me if this was to "protect us" then they shouldn't collect any revenue at all!!
I've mentioned this in another post but it is worth repeating here. The steemcleaners aren't an official part of steemit, its a group of volunteers. The funds raised go to removing the payouts from plagiarized posts, helping to fund the operation of the cheetah bot, and rewarding the users/members of the group who spend hours looking for plagiarized posts.
I'd like to think that every steemian would voluntarily donate their time and precious voting power to fight abuse without any monetary incentive but alas that isn't the case. The amount of plagiarized posts on steemit is staggering and it takes a ton of voting power to remove all of those payouts. Go look at a steemcleaners log post and look how many posts that are downvoted. All of those removed payouts are steem that is going back in the pool to go to deserving members instead of plagiarists and scammers.
Hmm...well I still consider myself to be a newb. My questions are:
Well, as far as steemcleaners goes, you can tell if its a bot by reading this post which gives a list of handy frequently asked questions that people have.
You can also tell its not a bot by the amount of actual people on this thread who are a part of steemcleaners telling you its not a bot, that we are just people lol.
Should bots make profit? It depends on the bot- Do you think fighting plagiarism is a worthy cause on steemit? If so, that is cheetahs main function and in order to run it needs to be funded. Do I think the @iliketoast bot or @ionlysaymeep need to profit? That's a matter of personal opinion, I mean I like toast but I'm not sure how much of a payout that thing actually warrants.
As far as what set of rules are used? A good starting point would be this post which outlines what we tend to consider abuse.
Obviously there will be disagreement, as community based volunteers we tend to listen to the feedback we are receiving. For example, an early point of contention was people who simply repost a youtube video without any additional text, commentary, etc.. just a straight link to a youtube video being posted dozens of times a day. At first we considered this spam because where is the effort in just reposting dozens of videos? What does it add? But it became clear that people were really pushing back against this so we let it go now.
Lately the issue seems to be mainly over affiliate and referral links with people split on what is acceptable and when does it become spam.
Well, I'm curious about citations. How do you know if something I'm writing is original or if I simply did a "copy/paste" from another article? That would be a tremendous amount of time for an individual to do google searches for chunks of your sentences to see if it matches another article. Something like that is most efficiently done by a bot.
And then you get into murky areas where, what if I'm not doing a copy/paste from another post I made on my other blog, but I'm still borrowing my own ideas? And if it's my own photo that I took, am I supposed to state that somewhere?
I'm not too worried about "spam" because I can simply "mute" them and I'll never worry about that again.
Also, thanks for trying to clear this up for me :-)
No problem, and luckily all your questions are easily answered. Cheetah is indeed a bot that does just that, scours the internet for text that is copied and pasted. When it detects a match, instead of flagging it, it gives you this message-
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:(link to the post with the same text).
If you are borrowing from your own blog on a regular basis all you have to do is send a message to cheetah that shows you own the other blog and you can be whitelisted so that cheetah ignores those posts coming from that site.Keep in mind, cheetah doesn't flag any of these posts, it just lets the reader know that this material is posted somewhere else online. The bot can't give any context to the situation, thats why we have actual people who run steemcleaners to look at every post before taking any action.
Unfortunately cheetah doesn't catch everything so you are correct, it IS a tremendous amount of effort for the volunteers of steemcleaners who spend their time googling chunks of text to find copied/spun material, doing reverse image searches on plagiarized photos, and using google translate to find all the foreign articles that cheetah cant find, etc..
As far as photos go, sure, if you took the photos on your post simply state that in the post. If you didn't take the photos you use in your post, just link to the source of where they came from. There plenty of sites out there like pixabay that have a ton of photos to use for free.
Steemcleaners generally won't police a few images in a post, even unsourced, so long as they aren't the entirety of the post. If, however, you are posting in the photography tab and trying to pass of photos as your own that are clearly not yours then you can expect a comment.
So, even if I provide a citation for a post, I'm still going to get cheetah paying me a visit, thus getting on someone's radar. Correct?
Initially, it's not being used to call you a cheater (or cheetah...I'm sure this is a slight play-on-words)...but it's your way of "tagging" someone's post for inspection. Correct?
I'm asking because I've cited other news stories before and provided the links to them. And maybe an hour later I get a little visit from cheetah.
Cheetah is just a bot, it doesn't know the context of your post. So long as enough of it is copied from somewhere else cheetah will stop in and comment on it.
Correct, you are not being called a cheater or flagged by cheetah. In order to avoid cheetah you would ideally be writing completely original content, but just because cheetah does comment on your post it doesn't mean that you have done anything wrong.
how were these posts flagged by your team?
no spam no referral links no plagiarism?
No spam no referral links no plagiarism , just abuse by your team.
A for profit, self governed censorship machine that holds grudges.
Fascism. Point blank.
And not just the word - go read about the actual definition.
Do you mean to say @adm has made 19 Million SBD mostly through self voting and upvoting his own bot?
This makes me very, very sad. I understand the DMCA/Plagiarism striker, but shouldn't the Admins of Steemit operate something like that? To keep the reward pool equally accessible to all? Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but I don't like the idea of spamming then self-upvoting your own posts.
I had seen a list of users who do nearly the same thing, using their obscene vote power to upvote all of their own posts and comments.
Some might say that's just human nature, but I believe greed and egocentrists are learned behaviors.
Hopefully my response, the response from patrice, and the comments from anyx on this post help to give you an idea of why the votes are cast the way they are.
As @orionsbelt mentioned, this a decentralized platform. There is literally nobody who works for steemit that does anything in an official capacity to fight plagiarism or abuse on the platform, it is all done by volunteers.
Edit: upvoting my own post because pjheinz flagged my last one without giving a reason, better safe than sorry with this one :)
I appreciate the open discussion, you'll notice that I haven't flagged you in retaliation because that really doesn't get us anywhere, even though you have flagged 2 of my comments now.
I was answering @lpfaust and his comment asking for more transparency by trying to provide him with more transparency. I am also trying to clear up some misinformation, mainly the fact that you keep calling steemcleaners a bot. As I mentioned in other comments we are not a bot, literally just a group of people.
As far as the blacklist bot goes, I have no idea who runs it but it isn't steemcleaners or anyx. As far as I can tell it just follows cheetah or steemcleaner flags but we have no control over it and frankly no idea who does.
There are no "admins" of steemit, this is decentralized platform working on consensus from witnesses(who keep blockchain alive), if someone should look into this issue then it should be the "witnesses"
gotcha, thank you. I had been getting the impression that Dan and Ned were basically the gatekeepers/bodyguard admin type function.
Wow what an eye opener 😲 you make alot of sense here 👍. Upvoted and resteemed and Followed 👌
Some ppl on steemit show off themselves as golden caped knights, but all they do is loot, loot and loot! Abuse their powers, downvoting ppl they don't like. We should really investigate properly before supporting these kind of guys.
Where the heck do you get your figures? They are so far off base it isn't even funny.
Steemcleaners $600 a day? Maybe for a week right after hard fork 19 when the rewards were out of whack. Lately we have been lucky to get $200 a day $100 from the daily log and $100 from the comments. Sure we get more if the log is huge and we have to split it into 2 parts.
240 comments a day? They might have been the record for one day but for months there were less than 50 a day usually between 10 and 30. Even if you do the math it comes out nowhere near your figures. 15304 posts over almost a year that's under 45 posts a day average. That's posts and comments combined.
As for the rest of your math it isn't even close to reality. You take no account of the value of steem which was as low as 6 cents for quite awhile.
It's perfectly clear you will do anything to skew your numbers in favor of your argument.
proof of self upvoting at my post
link to post
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@stuffy/plexcoin-the-ico-worth-investing
I'm not speaking about, was the flag fair or not, let's leave this out of the equation (post fixed, flag removed, if you still want to know)
What's crazy is have never seen a post of mine reach over 7 bucks and was only one post. And the only one but hey I'm grateful for the small shares. I could be doing this same thing on Facebook or any other site for free. Only been here a month and a half and imma keep pushing forward.
#circleoffriends
Look at your own little spam bot army upvoting you. Pretty hypocritical and corrupt.
Wow my friend I'm applauded by your eagerness to bring a real issue to the forefront. Keep one thing in mind though, like every new trending thing it get abused.
One profits from the vast majority while the majority is truest responsible for the work. Sounds exactly like society's selfish tactics. WHO ARE WE TO JUDGE? We are the people and can take action as a whole yet we individually still have some of the same tendencies.
HOLD YOUR HEAD UP BROTHER IT GETS BETTER👍🏾👍🏾
The streets will flow with the blood of the non-believers...