Some thoughts on a new Steem witness- Plagiarism, begging, and more!

This doesn't bode well for steem...

Having been on steemit since mid 2016 I generally had the sense of what I wanted in a witness. Someone who was actively contributing to the community be it behind the scenes with development work or someone who was out front and communicated really well with the community. Both reasonable expectations if you want to be one of the select few worthy of being voted into the coveted top 20 witness spots.

I'd like to contrast that with what Steem has now, I give you @parse, the current #17 witness on Steem. He joined in March and has 13 posts and two followers. He appears to be Persian though he got off to an inauspicious start with a member of the Persian community on steem calling him out as a sock puppet. After that he made a few other posts, one of his most recent post being a several sentence explanation of cryptocurrency in general. This post is both comical because it touts the decentralized nature of what a cryptocurrency should be and for the fact that it is not even an original thought, it is plagiarized.

Here is the @parse post translated from Persian to english-

"Some of the new digital currency that is based on cryptographic methods is called digital currency, cryptocurrency or cryptocurrency.
Most digital currencies are implemented on a distributed basis called blockchain or blockchain chain. The blockchain network also has a decentralized, transparent and unchanging structure. The decentralized concept here is that no person, entity, or organization has control over it. In addition, anyone can transfer digital currencies easily to another person anywhere in the world without the need for any intervention,"

and here is the source post also translated from persian to english-

"Some of the new digital money that comes from cryptocurrencies is called digital currency, cryptocurrency, or cryptocurrency.
Most digital currencies are implemented on a distributed basis called block chains or block chains. China Block Network also has a decentralized, transparent and unchanging structure. The decentralized concept here is that no person, entity, or organization has control over it. In addition, anyone can transfer digital currencies easily and without the need for any intermediary anywhere in the world"

So a little light plagiarism, what else does he do?

Well, when he isn't busy stealing material online, he seems to spend his time begging people to resteem his other posts.

One of those is even more impressive as he found a 2 year old post about cats to drop a fresh comment on to beg a user for resteems who hasn't been active since April of last year. The lone non-begging comment was using one of his dozen or so interactions on the blockchain thus far to insult @pfunk for calling out him out. A wtiness should be a little more diplomatic than that, even when someone is insulting you. You also dont want a good chunk of your posts to be either plagiarism or insults, thats not a good look for a witness. I don't want to overuse this meme but it's just so damn accurate right now-

Now I don't want to say all the new witnesses are this level of terrible. There seem to be some people who are generally interested in maintaining things on a professional level. I just want to see competent witnesses at least until things settle down and everyone figures out which direction the chain is heading. Thanks for reading :)