Hey, my wonderful followers!

It's @shayne here with a cautionary tale.

Don't steel content.

I'm telling you... just don't do it.

I was warned by @jonny-clearwater that someone was posting my YouTube videos without permission. When I went to check out this profile for myself I also saw unsourced videos by @andrarchy, @trevonjb, and many others.

So I left this message on one of their posts with my video:

I gave this account 12 hours to do this simple request, and in that time they posted about 10 more times on their blog -- all other people's content -- so I figured that was a "go ahead" signal that I should start flagging all the content that was unsourced.

So I started flagging.

Luckily, I'd hardly voted that day, so my vote power was all charged up.

After a while, this is what their wall looked like:

After doing this, I went to bed.

Their response.

I woke up about an hour ago and found this response. Mind you, this was about 19 hours after I had posted my warning:

And the post that had my video in it was changed to this:

Good, he removed it. I don't like the begging for compensation, but he removed it.

So after I post this blog I'm going to go back and un-flag everything I flagged.

But before doing that, I left this reply, because you spammers need to understand something about Steemit: it's not the same as other social medai; if you abuse Steemit, the Steemit Community will repay you in kind.

I'm not trying to be mean.

My hope is that this experience will teach this user to stop abusing the Steemit platform and the Steemit community. Because what I said above is true: bots will flag you into the grave with zero remorse and no option of recompense.

And further, I hope that this users experience can be a warning to others through this post.

Don't spam other people's content on your blog.

Don't plagiarize.

Do your own work on Steemit -- that's how you will make it here.

How to use other's content.

You might see me posting content by Mike Cernovich and InfoWars with minimal commentary.

This is because I have permission to do so.

If you want to post content from other people on Steemit, either get permission first, or make it part of a larger commentary, which would make it fair use. And if, when you ask for permission, the content creator says no, don't use my content -- respect that.

And if someone wants you to take their video down, have some respect for their wishes and consider it.

I'm not saying you have to remove the content if you don't want to -- for instance, if you're doing a critical commentary about the person's video and they just don't like what you're saying and ask you to take it down -- you can leave it up, just be prepared to get flagged.

What do you think?

Steemit is still an experimental platform, and we are all learning how to use it together.

It's challenging to discover the boundaries of good practices on a new platform with no centralized use rules. But the community here is good -- much better than other social media (imo) -- and with the pressure of reputation-based power, people are incentivized to be decent to each other.

And I like that.

Follow me @shayne