It's interesting because plagiarism is a real problem - I have only been here a few days and I keep noticing how much of the stuff posted is off topic to the tags and either copy and paste, or really badly modified from the source.
The API and the $$$ incentivizes people to take short cuts like this, and obviously humans are doing a bad job of housekeeping it.
Having dolphins caught by the tuna nets though is also a big problem.
There needs to either be a way to appeal or a way to have the canonical tag applied to prevent false positives?
I definitely agree that plagiarism is a problem and based on the description contained in the Cheetah bot FAQ it was much, much worse. But your analogy of dolphins being caught in the tuna nets is a good one and pretty much describes what seems to be happening here - and no one is on deck to cut them out and release them in a timely manner. Those people who run a business know that it is the people who have a negative experience like that are the ones that scream the loudest - every negative review is much more impactful than a single positive one.
Really we need to make sure that false flags are resolved well within the 7-day earnings period and if there is some standardized automated process for vouching for the authenticity of your own content when you've reposted from another source then we should have clearly document processes and folks who are willing to help out the less technically able (I predict the vast majority of Steemit users could not figure out how to add DNS or HTML metadata to their sites). But most could probably manage to post their Steemit ID and a special keyword to a blog or web page.
Completely agree, if the experience leaves a bad taste then the community can't grow
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