The Daily Downvote: We need YOUR Help
The Daily Downvote is an effort to help curb abuse & misuse within the steemit platform. It's rather simple. Since there is a potential to earn real money on steemit, many people are intrigued and attempt to make a quick payday... often at any cost. Some of them will, while others will not. It's all a part of the beauty and attraction of steemit.
However, when people post content that is deceptive, plagiarized, spam or otherwise lacks any honest effort to create a contribution to the steemit community, it takes away from the overall experience. It prevents genuine, high-quality and original content from being seen. It also entices others to follow suit. This greatly diminishes steemit as a whole. It robs us all of usability and detracts from the quantifiable value that steemit holds.
Do you think this makes Kenny Powers happy???? No, it makes him want to punch people in the face!
The Daily Downvote is one of my personal contributions to help steemit perform at its best, and reach its full potential.
Each day, or every other day - or whenever I have the spare time to kill - I'll be posting a short list of users and/or posts that I have downvoted (flagged). What I'd like to see happen is that YOU will also go and downvote these posts. This helps to discourage abuse and prevents others from accidentally voting on something that is spam, scam, plagiarized, etc.
I assure you that I do my research. Anything I have downvoted has been crosschecked - I wouldn't post it here if I wasn't 100% sure. I want this to be based on trust.
I am not here to downvote things I don't like or disagree with, so please don't assume this is about judgement or the policing of steemit. I am an enormous advocate of freedom of choice/speech/action. I simply want to do my part to reduce abuse so we can all enjoy a content rich experience.
This will be my first posting of The Daily Downvote, with just a few examples to get started. Please, get out there and downvote these! I'd also expect some of you whales to understand the philosophy behind this and why it's important - so please get out there, you big fat whales. Help us optimize the Blockchain!
The Daily Downvote
Today's Top Offenders:
@monattalent
Everything this user posts is 100% stolen content from trendhunter.com. Anything & everything they post is fair game for a downvote. Don't believe me? Copy & paste any one of their posts into google and hit search.
@dots
Everything this user posts... Well, the only thing this user posts is....... Just check it out for yourself! Don't forget to downvote the posts.
@jackgallenhall
This guy is a scammer in many things; even posting stolen images as his own photography. Here's an example of one of his posts where he claims everything was shot with his "Sony Cybershot". Unfortunately, a quick reverse image search proved otherwise - they are all stolen photos. Even his pet "Gold Eagle", which can be seen here, for sale 2 years ago on a birds of prey website.
... and 2 more posts from random users that are blatant spam
Random Spam Post #1
Random Spam Post #2
This is a serious effort and I need your help to make my efforts effective. This is just ONE of many things you can contribute to steemit if you're serious about its value.
Get out there and DOWNVOTE!
If you have any questions, concerns or comments, please leave them below. I'm glad to discuss this and am open to any & all feedback.
Wonderful concept - I've followed you! Please consider returnging the favour if you like my stuff : ) @freewill
Thank you! I appreciate this. I've followed you as well.
I could be wrong about this, but there is a user named "justinlaak" that has been posting $1000 articles for a week straight and always has a bunch of commercial-quality photos but usually very little written content. I'm fairly certain that the photos aren't his and the quality of the content is akin to someone who just paraphrased really basic info from other sites. There's practically no attribution whatsoever. Might be worth looking into, because his posts get whale/bot attention and give big payouts. All of the SBD from the past week was cashed out last night.
Like I said - I could be way off here, but something just doesn't smell right. I'd hate to see money leaving the platform like that while others struggle just to be seen. If I'm wrong, I'll certainly apologize.
I gave it a quick check, it's legit. He uses stock photos from free stock photo sites.
I understand your concern, as this is still a publishing platform and universal copyright rules do apply, just as they do anywhere else.
Oh, ok. So he's just being rewarded for posting free stock photos. Good to know.
I'm not sure that this is any better, but thanks for checking on it.
Well.. Using stock photos in a story is better than using stock photos as your own photography. In the world of publishing, stock photos are legit. I understand your frustration, but the reason I created this post is more geared towards abuse. I really don't want to get into the ethics of making money on steemit, because there's a fine line on that. What I'm able to do is at least make sure that blatant theft of copyrighted work is downvoted. I hope that makes sense.
No doubt about that. I was just remarking on the absurdity of posting free stock photos and that being the factor that's attracting whales and bots - and paying out thousands of dollars for it.
If it's legit, then there's nothing to be done. Still a bit silly, if you ask me.
I made a post about how down voting hurts steemit in a whole. could you please check it out and leave some comments on it, your point of view would be greatly appreciated on the subject.
Thanks for your time.
https://steemit.com/voting/@skeptic/why-i-think-steemit-will-die
@pierce-the-veil: Hey thanks for this post @xvickx, very interesting concept.
I trust it will be popular enough to sustain a weekly following.
I'm thinking out of the box myself, in regards to counterracting what i've dubbed the "steemshit" effect. Which as you have so stated, is preventing views on quality content.
Check out a similar weekly venture we just started,
Graveyard Edition & Undertaker Awards: https://steemit.com/money/@pierce-the-veil/bring-out-yer-dead-a-steemit-graveyard-edition
Thanks again. Upvote for you.
@pierce-the-veil
Thanks for participating and thanks for the comment, that means a lot. It's a joint effort, man!
Secondly, I checked your link and I think that's an absolutley BRILLIANT idea! I will be a participant for sure. Followed!
been here about 2 days. i love it. don't know how to downvote yet. i have very unpopular ideas. almost all i do is research. how do i avoid being downvoted for discussing unpopular facts?
p.s. i don't like spam or spammers either. good on ya.
You shouldn't be downvoted for discussing something just because it's unpopular. However, I encourage you to maybe change your approach if you're finding that your ideas are unpopular. Surely there's an audience out there for your ideas, you just need to find them & make an appealing presentation.
By the way, you can downvote by using the flag that appears next to the title of each post. You can find it on the right side of the post's title itself, as well as on the right side of each post in any category feed.
rockin', thanks for the information.
Even if steemit has many other things to do right, really important things like voting power, a fairer distribution of rewards for authors/curators, organizing things in categories, areas of interest, linking categories, creating profiles for users and not feeding them with overwhelming content, even if all this is realy important, I think the cleanup process is welcomed. I'm joining in.
Thanks. I'm following you.
Why would you downvote @dots, who only posts dots in #dots?!?!? Let @dot post dots in #dots, people!
I just checked out his blog. I can certainly say this about @dots - whoever they are, they're certainly dedicated to their posting genre. Yeah, it's not great content, but now I'm curious to see how long it'll go on.
Do you consider it to be quality content? A legitimate contribution? Personally it made me laugh, but these are the things that make it harder for serious people to get exposure on genuine content. I hope that makes sense.
I am sorry I must disappoint you: it doesn't make any sense at all. Whether I judge something quality content or not is meaningless in this context.
I just went back and upvoted each and every post @dots dotted in #dots on principle, because @dots should be free to dot dots every day in #dots. And I clicked on follow too, because I want to upvote every dot @dots dots in #dots from now on and until all eternity.
It is not abusive, it doesn't slander, doesn't speak lies, doesn't steal content, doesn't insult and doesn't dot dots in #food or #photography. @dots is filling #dots with dots just as others are filling #introduceyourself with cleavage, which I don't downvote either just because I don't consider it "quality content", and @dots should have every right to do so without harrassment.
The problem is the interface that forces everyone to browse by /new and doesn't allow to filter and to block #dots, for example.
But @dots has done no harm dotting dots in #dots.
I beg to differ. Could they be performing a social expirement? Sure. But what's to say that a spam link isn't doing the same? Or, someone who can barely put a sentence together making posts that are horrible uncomfortable to read, but they're really trying...? There's a fine line there..
Dots has never made a comment on anyone else's content. Are they free to do so? I suppose, but with that level of uselessness, from a contributory perspective, I downvote it. It totally lacks any effort at all. With that mentality, we better leave a post of a single photo of a cat, whose post title is 'Cat'... I mean, with all due respect here, come on. Steem is in Beta. Wouldn't you prefer to attempt to set a standard for expectations BEFORE there's 20 million people on here with zero understand of things and the feeds are full of spam and posts consisting of dots without explanation?
We have to get realistic somewhere and I think that things such as dots should be downvoted without question. It's a matter of the platform, not PC ethics of things.. And even from an ethical perspective, dots may do no harm but it holds ZERO value whatsoever to any person and to the overall platform.
Here I have one guy jealous because someone is making money with stock photos, and here's you worried about hurting the feelings and/or the morality of downvoting posts containing ZERO effort whatsoever.
As if I'm the thought police. My only goal was to help clean up the platform in an effective way. It has nothing to do with censorship so you can save that illustrious idea for someone else.. Maybe we need to see what some of the whales and real thinkers have to say about the validity of the idea.. I'd be curious to know.
Regardless, I believe you make a "valid-enough" point that I believe I should think twice about the dots thing, and focus only on spam and plagiarism. Thanks for your input and for helping me come to this conclusion.
@pierce-the-veil: Hello @xvickx, it's time for another daily down-vote posthaste. :P
I have an exciting new submission, a user who's sole purpose is to constantly harass, threaten and annoy. Current profile is @feminism. Now he wants to play with @pierce-the-veil. I'm happy to oblige and have already established an energetic contract which I am satisfied will play out after this life.
Time to get the posse together! Lets banhammer this little shit out of existence and move on to more important matters.
Ciao!
I already have friends looking into his ip address to find out just where this rat lives. With a little luck, he'll get a little visit his way from feds soon.
After my recent experience with one such asshole, I'm now inclined to completely agree with your sentiment...
Oh. I'm already following you.
Great, thanks for following! It's important to keep the crap to a minimum, as spam and scandalous posts are going to increase exponentially as more and more users come to the platform.
I should have emphasized that; I was already following you when I checked to follow you ;)
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