The Rise of the Copy Pasta: Read First, Vote After
What if I told you that sometimes people simply copy and paste someone else's work in its entirety and post it on Steemit.com
I know! I too am flabbergasted to hear this — and that's impressive since I'm the one typing it!
"That's rich" you might say, "coming from a guy who copypasted a gif and a meme but didn't create it himself! That's unoriginal content!" Yes, that's very astute! In no way am I suggesting that every single piece of everything in a post must be completely original. But we've got to have some kind of standard! Right? Besides, we already know that everything is a remix.
Often you'll see a long post about a trending topic, Pokemon Go for example, which, at first glance, looks like the poster really put some effort into it — and effort should be rewarded! I'll usually upvote posts that aren't particularly my cup of tea content-wise, but I want to reward the person for getting up, putting on pants, and getting to work bringing something into existence from their own brains.
We've seen an influx of this type of thing on Steemit
But not only that, some of them get a decent amount of upvotes. My guess is that people, like me, want to reward the people who create content — and when it looks that way, they simply scan, upvote, and move on. Maybe a quick "that was great, man, keep it up!" comment as well.
Let's try to do better
When I come across a longer post, I often will google search some of the content to see if it was copy and pasted from anywhere else, word for word. It's the least I can do. No, really. The least. I don't have time, energy, or care enough to be the Copypasta Police but I do want to uphold a certain standard for Steemit, and I don't like to see people getting away with this type of thing, being rewarded!
A lot of the time if the person has included a source, I don't kick a fuss, but truth be told even that is not good enough.
Here's what I'd do
Not that I am the purveyor of good Steem etiquette, but I think it's a good start anyway:—
When the main content of my post is taken from somewhere else, I'll take the effort to make it very clear that the content is not my own. If I am using content from elsewhere to reinforce my point, in other words — not the main content of the post, I'll put them in quotes like so:
ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ARE CONSIDERED PLAGIARISM:
-turning in someone else's work as your own
-copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
-failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
-giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation
-changing words but copying the sentence structure of a source without giving credit
-copying so many words or ideas from a source that it makes up the majority of your work, whether you give credit or not
Source
Then, I'll wrap that content in my own thoughts such as I have here and provide a link to the source that I got it from.
And that's pretty much it!
I know we can do better, we just have to take the time to look at what we're upvoting and think about what we want to reward on this platform.
Excellent article. It says a lot that it needed to be written.
Honest, creative people know this intuitively. Interested to see how this issue will d/evolve with the growth of the platform.
Everything is a Remix is my favorite documentary.
Would it be possible some automatic search on each post to show how strongly it is copywise related to other posts? It would be a robot version of what you say you do "When I come across a longer post, I often will google search some of the content to see if it was copy and pasted from anywhere else, word for word."
It could even give a % how much is a copy paste of previous contents and of course provide the link to that content. I am not a dev but I can imagine with todays AI tech it should be possible to do something like this.
Ummm I could build a bot that detects this and adds a comment with its source(s)? This way people will know immediately. Thoughts? Vote this up if you want to see me make this. Comment if you want to help.
curious as to your position on this since writing it...
have heard a bit about different bots ("cheetah" I believe, one specifically) that are running to check for plagiarised material. not sure how effective they've been, though seems a viable option to develop to help solve the problem...
also must give credit to a number of individual users who've been helping out to bust plagiarisers...
I've been involved in the Steemit Abuse channel on Slack and then on the new chat. So we've discussed a lot about plagiarism and I still tend to look for it, especially with photos that come in for the contest I run every week. If I find blatant plagiarism it's sent to the channel to be double checked, if it is plagiarism people tend to flag it and leave a comment on the article. For photos I tend to email the photographer through their portfolio website if it comes up with a reverse image search, asking them to confirm the steemit account.
Anyx created Cheetah to act as a helper for manual curators, so it leaves a comment and then anyx or whoever goes through and manually double checks it before it goes on to the 'next step' which might be leaving another comment or flagging or adding to a bot ban list.
It's not 100% fool proof, but we've caught a lot of them.
Great article.
I believe that steemit is a place to WRITE content but that it should also allow people to post articles written by others.
I posted about Declara.com today, which I believe is a great complement to steemit.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@sebastien/introduction-to-a-good-friend-of-steemit-declara-com
In the end, steemit will have to transform. Copy-pasted/ Curated content has to be rewarded too, less than Created content for sure. But both are needed because if you want to write good stuff, you have to read good stuff before.
I think it's mostly about being honest with the content and the rewards will be given appropriately - if you want to share content, posting the link with your opinions and response counts as OC which people will likely upvote (if it's good) and posting the link with "thought you'd all be interested" counts as sharing the content for comment and discussion, which is where the upvotes and stuff will end up.
I had this response typed up but forgot to enter it!
Thanks for the feedback, my issue is that right now a lot of people (myself included) want to reward original content, but people aren't taking the time to ensure that it is original. When people make a post that looks original , sometimes they are getting upvoted simply because people think it's original and not because its really great content. I'm totally fine with curating content from elsewhere, but I think it needs to be clear that it comes from elsewhere and not be passed off as being one's own thoughts.
I think steemit has a lot of potential to inspire people to make original content. Steem power holders need to make sure they're upvoting real content. My hope is that steemit will be a space for education and entertainment.
If you want to develop your creative skills, check out this tutorial I made specifically for steemit users.
https://steemit.com/blender/@djleo/make-the-steem-logo-blender-tutorial
Jup. Good stuff. One question though @jamtaylor:
Don't you think that this is a topic that will eradicate it self once there will be more users? The posts that will stand out are most likely the ones that are #original #acurate #wellwritten and most of all have their #ownvoice
Looking forward to your thoughts.
Future Food
Yes and no, it will continue to become more and more difficult to stand out on your own merit, you'll have to get noticed among the fray. I don't think spam will ever really go away, but we may be able to curate our feeds a bit better with the Follow function, and delve into the Newly Created section every now and then. Although, if spammers and copypasters realize they can't really make money this way (because nobody will upvote them) then the problem won't be as bad. =
Better curation with the #followfunction is a major point I'm missing at the moment. I've been following a few so far but I can't seem to figure out how to see those I follow..
I'm confident that this issue will be fixed, heck its been only so short since Steemit was created :)
But I really appreciate your critical approach. Keep it up!
Future Food
Your proposals are good, but take some time and people like me are lazy and don't bother going into depths. Time is universal cure for that problem, like for everything else. Also if there is good content on other platforms, it needs to leak to this one too, so if someone is faster than original content creator one can profit form it (its not fair, but this is how things work). This platform even pays you to be faster than others in sharing quality content or copy pasta content.
To be clear your proposals are right in every way, but internet people are illiterate and blind for those thing is first place and since internet is free medium, one thinks its all his. So thank you for pionting your educated and fair ways to people.
I agree that preventing or discouraging people from being copy-pasta experts will make this platform sustainable. Perhaps, a downvote button is necessary?
We had a downvote button at first but it has become a 'flag' button which is pretty much the same thing, it's in the upper right corner of the post