@iamstan has been asking me to write something for @utopian-io for a few weeks now so I figured I need to get my arse in gear and do something.
I have been a member of the discord anti-abuse channel, @steemflagrewards for several months and have seen it in grow in stature, gain delegations for its cause and become more visible to Steemians in general.
Some don’t welcome it at all and seem to think it is some crusade against the ‘stolen money’ that they are entitled to have for producing whatever content they deem appropriate.
I have no doubts that some that I have targeted are going to flag this post. Well, go right ahead, because I don’t really care.
The STEEM blockchain is about content. Content that is of some value. Why is it that some think that plagiarism, spam, voting their own comment up every time they do comment or creating a vote farm of 300 STEEM delegated accounts is of value?
If I flag something and mention @steemflagrewards in a reply comment, I get back in rewards more than I flag. It’s not called @steemflagrewards for nothing. It’s an incentive to rid the blockchain of poor content.
The channel is headed by @anthonyadavisii, @iamstan, and several other administrators and moderators.
They dedicate their efforts to flagging, writing articles about abuse, and trying to raise attention to all the good content writers of the level of abuse that goes on.
Most don’t notice it, but you should be aware of it, as it is a problem. Scammers are looting the reward pool to feed their pockets leaving less for you, the real producers of content.
What can I do about this?
Well, that depends. Do you have a full vote of say $0.03? If so, why not join the fight and visit SFR at their discord channel here. If you have a bigger vote, then even better.
Just be aware that even though you will be rewarded by SFR on the value of your flag, the scammer may retaliate and flag your ‘good content’ out of spite.
You can choose which battles you want to fight, and if you have 1500SP, then don’t fight the spammer dolphin at 8000SP who may well seek his retribution on you.
It does happen, but the SFR team are a tightly knit group and we do try and equal out injustice's done by appropriate ‘compensation’ votes.
From my perspective as a dolphin, I can dish out bigger flags and do so quite regularly. It’s getting a little of a ritual of mine to expend any spare VP I have every evening on flags.
Who to flag?
The SFR team make it their duty to hunt down abusers and highlight them in the ‘flags-needed’ section. It’s like being handed the ammunition before firing the shots.
If you're new to the group, you can see this channel but you can't chat here.
Just to be clear, I don’t enjoy pissing people off or removing their rewards. I always hope they will join the SFR channel and post something in the ‘flag-dispute’ area.
If they do, then they will get a swift response. Some spout abuse and don’t want to listen to why they have been flagged, but others really don’t know they are committing abuse and can be quite humble about it. These are the people we hope to see in there.
Is it re-education? Yes, it is. Some have changed their ways and are now producing content that is worthy of their rewards. If this happens, we have succeeded.
I want to add an example of somebody who we thought had changed their ways but still has not. I hope @ahmadchemist737 sees and reads this article. If he doesn’t change his posts, he will continue to be flagged until he does something about it.
This guy likes his bid-bots and uses around EIGHTEEN different ones per post.
Have a look at this post and explain to me why its worthy of $23 of rewards?
He’s paying for his votes you might say? Yes, he is. Though due to @thedarkhorse and myself, in this case, he is possibly making a loss.
Is it OK to use this many BOTS to up your post to an exteme value? Well, that depends. Is the post adding value to the blockchain?
Do you see other comments on the post praising the author for his wonderful authentic genuine work? I see none, and I see none on all the other posts he makes.
Is it copied work or is it his original content? I think it may be copied but I can’t guarantee it.
I do know @ahmadchemist737 has previously been scanning things from books, and expecting nobody to notice. Is he now simply typing them in from the same books?
Sometimes I want to scream to these people, ‘WRITE SOMETHING ORIGINAL’. It’s not that hard and the satisfaction you gain from being original and creating something unique can be great.
Is being in a non-western developed country a reason to NOT do this? No, it’s not; and if you want some inspiration then look at @el-nailul (above) and his blog. This one attracted a @curie vote.
His first language is not English and yet he produces original content and teaches us lazy westerners about things we don’t know about. I will continue to support @el-nailul and other good authors via my @chops.support passive voting account.
@ahmadchemist737 has already challenged his flags with SFR and we thought he was on the straight and narrow, but it’s not happened yet.
He has recently had some conversations with @steevc but just doesn’t seem to understand what he is doing wrong.
I will leave @ahmadchemist737 alone for now and hope he sees this and learns something.
How to find things to flag (the lazy way).
Go to the SFR Comments page. Pick any.
Open a post and see if the reward is NOT $0.00. If it still has rewards pending you can use an add-on flag and help reduce it to a NULL value.
The keyword used here is 'bid bot abuse'. SFR uses a BOT that checks for certain keywords, such as spam, vote farming, and several others. @steemflagrewards also needs to be in the comment (a mention).
Then that BOT brings your mention from a flagged post or comment to SFR's private channel. There your mention will wait for approval upvote.
If you click 'View the full content' you can see if the post has any remaining rewards to remove.
I can see a remaining $2.08 of rewards on this post. So it's time to remove some more.
](https://images.hive.blog/768x0/https://img.esteem.ws/frz67f0imn.png)
I simply have a Spam.txt file on my desktop I can just copy and paste from. It makes life easier when I do several at a time.
So now it's $1.78 and some of the reward for this post has been returned to the pool where it should be.
The author will likely still get something from it but it's in the interests of SFR to make it not worth doing anymore.
Conclusion.
Flagging is a dirty business and @steemflagrewards needs more delegation if it is to grow. I only delegate 100SP but if others did likewise it would help a lot.
Don’t expect a daily vote for your delegation, there is no ROI. What you will get is respect, and that’s worth a lot more than a crappy vote most times.
I have recently added all the SFR administrators and moderators to the @chops.support account for a passive daily vote. It’s not a lot now, but I hope to increase it in the coming months. You guys are awesome!
If you found this article so invigorating that you are now a positively googly-eyed, drooling lunatic with dripping saliva or even if you liked it just a bit, then please upvote, comment, resteem, engage me or all of these things.
Thank you so much for putting together such an extensive contribution for the antiabuse category, @slobberchops.
I see this is well-received by many and greatly empowering. Your casual flair in writing makes this entertaining. Entertaining enough that we might be getting more Steemians to join the clean up brigade!
I appreciate how you made a glowing example of @el-nailul. Original content from a non-English native speaker and he received a Curie vote!
Thanks for walking us through a Dolphin's abuse fighting session. We need more great contributions such as yours to raise awareness and prevent abuse on the platform.
Your contribution has been evaluated according to Utopian policies and guidelines, as well as a predefined set of questions pertaining to the category.
To view those questions and the relevant answers related to your post, click here.
Need help? Write a ticket on https://support.utopian.io/.
Chat with us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Thank you for your review, @lovenfreedom! Keep up the good work!
Thanks for posting a antiabuse article. I think you did an excellent job and hope the entire community will be able to read this.
Wouldn't it be nice to get the majority of the platform to agree on some particular types of abuse? Then have the whole community involved in stopping it?
I think we can all agree that plagiarism is not good for any platform. Some things that are pretty important, and low effort work bid to trending. Do we want the world to believe they can come here and post one sentence 10 times a day and make a living? Scams, phishing who cant agree that phishers are wrong?
Shouldn't we all join in the battle against many types of abuse. The way I see it is like the Common Law.... Injured party criminal case. Broken contract civil case.
If the type of abuse hurts another person or people it should be considered abuse.
Everyone should be able to agree upon that.
Agree on all the things you say. Writing things of substance takes time. It tends to flow out of me when I start but it is essentially work what we are doing.
If we enjoy it (I do), then its great and maybe it should be rewarded if other's think its worthy.
I will be doing more of these posts, the more we do.. the more aware people are. When STEEM rises again (no pun intended) it will get worse and more of us will be needed to whittle out the crap.
Great Post mate. This is stuff that needs saying. We can't bury our heads and hope it goes away. If we don't fall with the new cases then others will do the same and Steemit will descend into shit post hell. We really need more people to support this effort with flags or delegation. We need to discuss this with people at Steemfest.
I think there will be a decent amout of chat about this subject. There's always too much for me to flag when I visit SFR, and as well as extra delegation (which I intend to hep with in the future) we need more flaggers, and people willing to take the retribution risk.
To be honest, if you pick your fights well there's little risk, and if we get to know about it (like you mentioned ast week), they can be counteracted.
There will always be the mat1973's you need to be wary of, but there's a lot of potential here. I hope some people head to SFR due to this post. The more the better.
Fuck it, I'm gonna join in on it as well. Maybe I missed it but do I just join the discord channel or how exactly do I get looped in on this?
Posted using Partiko Android
Woo!! that would be great, we need more dolphin fighters. Join the dicord channel, and add something in the introduction section. They are very quick to pick up and someone of your size would help massively.
Alright! gonna do that a bit later today then! Cheers buddy!
Posted using Partiko Android
You know, SFR takes a delegation from a huge shit poster who wiped out at least a week's worth of my work for no good reason. I didn't use any bots, no plagiarism; just one comment he did not like because I didn't agree with flagging someone's newbie followers, instead of flagging the abuser. He then kept me on the bots for weeks and offered to take me off the bots if I joined his campaign. This is the reason I'll stay on the sidelines for now and also the reason my rep is where it's at. Nothing personal, just business and principle. Greetings.
He's not my favourite person by any means and the project can't choose what delegations they accept. I delegate to them too and if they get lots then his contribution is less significant. Of course there are other anti-abuse projects you can support.
You have some balls, I'll give you that to say these things here. However, I don’t want to discuss personal grievances publicly it’s just not the place.
Sorry you feel that way. I won't do it again. Have a safe trip. Greetings.
Thanks, it should be fun and if you have a discord account, please drop me a DM.
Really appreciate you getting the good word out, @slobberchops!
Y'all motivate the hell out of me. Have a ton of things that I hope to implement to enhance the flagging experience of every abuse fighter. I think things like that will help us usher in a new age for Steem.
Together, we are making abuse the path of greater resistance and that is a great thing. Imagine when we have more substantial SP. Gonna be good. 😌
Thanks @anthonyadavisii !!
A few have expressed interest and had a look at SFR already. It must be working but some more delegation would really help. I plan to add to mine when I get my finances back in order again.
I will also be writing more of these and have one waiting here. There's many different angles to look at and I think I can add some of my personal experiences (via examples) to help the potential new guys who may join us.
It is really quite difficult task to find and flagging on something. Only the brave and the strong personality would be able to do so, beside the steem power that they are holding. I appreciate your support on my post as always. How is life there on the way to Krakow?. Say hello to all steemit family there from Aceh @slobberchops. wish you all the best. If you need this document into Bahasa Please let me know
There's been several from Aceh who we have flagged. You should set up some training for them on how to do it properly!
Yes, and i am doing writing mentoring and article discussion on arteem discord channel twice a week for Indonesian only. we discuss how to make good content posts. it has been running for 9 weeks so far @slobberchops. Our goals is to improve the quality of the article they post on steemit at least for beginner.
That's great. Go and tell them how to do it!
I'm not ready to give this my Steem Pope Seal of Approval, but I'll be looking into this. Note that I am not @steempope. That's the antipope.
I'm not your enemy, though.
That's all I can ask from you @antipope, thanks for looking and even more for taking a look at this.
Very interesting! I think it is good what this group is doing to help clean up the blockchain. There really is so much crap out there and it is nice to see that people actually do care about more than just making some cash off of a crap post!
You are big enough to join, come visit SFR.
I might be big enough to join, but my rewards aren't big enough to sustain the hit if someone decides to retaliate! I am on the Discord server though. I might poke around a little more than usual to get the feel for the place :)
Hello Mr Bozz :) If you are on Discord, DM me lovenfreedom#5290
You don't need to flag. If you happen to see a plagiarist or spammy character just drop it at SFR :)
Sounds good! Thanks for the info!
I am an independent flagger, and honestly did not know this program exists. I'm very interested. VERY.
Permission to DM you to discuss this a little farther? Like FB It's complicated.
Of course! though I am at work so may not answer right away.
You got a great payout on this and it's well deserved as this is a detailed post explaining clearly how SFR works. I'm in two minds about bidbot use, although I don't use them myself. I haven't got round to joining SFR yet, but I probably will once I get myself organised. (Just got a text message from my tenant about a roof leak. This kind of stuff and being away on a course is distracting me from Steemit recently; non-stop interruptions!)
Hi, @slobberchops!
You just got a 16.17% upvote from SteemPlus!
To get higher upvotes, earn more SteemPlus Points (SPP). On your Steemit wallet, check your SPP balance and click on "How to earn SPP?" to find out all the ways to earn.
If you're not using SteemPlus yet, please check our last posts in here to see the many ways in which SteemPlus can improve your Steem experience on Steemit and Busy.
Hi @slobberchops!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your post is eligible for our upvote, thanks to our collaboration with @utopian-io!
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
Hey, @slobberchops!
Thanks for contributing on Utopian.
We’re already looking forward to your next contribution!
Get higher incentives and support Utopian.io!
Simply set @utopian.pay as a 5% (or higher) payout beneficiary on your contribution post (via SteemPlus or Steeditor).
Want to chat? Join us on Discord https://discord.gg/h52nFrV.
Vote for Utopian Witness!