LINK TO MY GITHUB PAGE WHERE I MAINTAIN MY PUBLIC STEEMIT COPYCAT BLACKLIST

Hello Steemit original content creators, hello Steemit copycats,

this is my 2nd Steemit account. On my main account, I’m an original content creator, publishing my own creative work for fellow Steemians to see and enjoy.

Unfortunately, I soon came to realize that Steemit, at this stage, is overrun by a whole network of semi-professional copycats. “Copycat” is the term I use here for people who do not contribute their own work, but copy existing work of others with the sole intention that, by publishing it here on Steemit, they make profits with it, with minimal investment in time and resources of their own. And by a network of people, I mean dozens, potentially hundreds, who apparently post copied content and spam daily, upvote each other mutually, and transfer Steem currencies back and forth between their accounts; people with a reputation in their 50ies even, or above.

I have a whole list of potential subjects already. I will go through this list, one by one, and use this account to check them, flag them, report them, and put them on a public blacklist on GitHub.

Copy/pasting is harmful

Steemit is all about original content. Providing original content is what Steemias get paid for. This is the very core, the essence of how on this decentralized content publishing platform, profits are distributed, and contribution rewarded. By letting malice individuals, or whole groups, manipulate the system by rewarding copied content equally as high or even higher than original content, the whole Steemit economy is in jeopardy, the Steem currencies in immediate danger of devaluation by reward inflation, and thus every single genuine content creator’s Steemit income at stake.

Not to mention that copying the work of others without their consent is potentially illegal and doing so with the sole intention of selling said work is highly unethical. If this sort of content makes up a significant part of Steemit’s content, the reputation of the whole platform will soon suffer, at the expense of all genuine content creators. Add to that the fact that search engines like Google will start to sort out Steemit results since they recognize and discard copied content, thus further diminishing the visibility of all content on this platform.

And I will do something about it

Copying is, for these reasons, discouraged by the Steemit community, regarded as “spam” and actively hunted down, admonished, and eventually flagged, first and foremost by steemcleaners, but also by many other Steemit “whales”, powerful users, and hundreds of anonymous spam reporters who desire to keep this platform clean and its economy healthy.

I have the highest appreciation for the work steemcleaners and all these other people do. And I decided to do my part as well, and more than that.

steemcleaners is great, but…

To be completely honest, I’m not satisfied anymore by simply filing reports to steemcleaners which, although a great initiative, suffers from a few imperfections, just according to what my experience is so far. I may delve into more details in a future post, but for now, the most important point I will bring forward is that they are in general just too slow to act. I do see the need to be cautious and to not abuse power; in fact, I do owe that I would do so as well. But while this is a great, laudable approach to treat people who make a small human error by letting an accidental content copy slip their attention, this I do not think is an efficient approach to handle a formidable army of semi-professional rip-off copycats, flooding the network daily with new copied articles.

What I’m going to do

Out of despair, and, yes, also out of hatred and disgust, I started this ridiculous private initiative of mine to do something about this situation. I will use this account to:

• search for and warn copycats by commenting on their articles
• report copycats to steemcleaners
• flag copycat posts
• expose copycats
• eventually, publish my whole list of copycats in order for others to act upon them or to even take an organized multi-user approach to flag all their newly-created spam content, until their reputation is utterly ruined.

Next steps

Why should you trust me? Actually, you shouldn’t. Not at this point. For now, I’m just another anonymous user. I could be a spammer myself.

If you’ve read so far, I would first of all like to thank you.

All I would ask you to do for now is to await my next few posts and then decide for yourself whether you would like to support my cause in any form. In my next post, I will lay out the very strict rules upon which I will handle copycats. Then, in subsequent posts, I will start to expose copycats, in the hope that, as long as I don’t possess the power to take action against them, others will.

This is a desperate, ridiculous und futile attempt to empower original creators by punishing the spammers. I do not expect this initiative to succeed. In fact, I do expect even this first post to be flagged into oblivion by people who might not share my views.

Still, I wanted to give it a try. This is the very least I can do.

Thank you. Megalosaurus

This is a 100% STEEM POWER post.