I've mentioned this in another post but it is worth repeating here. The steemcleaners aren't an official part of steemit, its a group of volunteers. The funds raised go to removing the payouts from plagiarized posts, helping to fund the operation of the cheetah bot, and rewarding the users/members of the group who spend hours looking for plagiarized posts.
I'd like to think that every steemian would voluntarily donate their time and precious voting power to fight abuse without any monetary incentive but alas that isn't the case. The amount of plagiarized posts on steemit is staggering and it takes a ton of voting power to remove all of those payouts. Go look at a steemcleaners log post and look how many posts that are downvoted. All of those removed payouts are steem that is going back in the pool to go to deserving members instead of plagiarists and scammers.
Hmm...well I still consider myself to be a newb. My questions are:
Well, as far as steemcleaners goes, you can tell if its a bot by reading this post which gives a list of handy frequently asked questions that people have.
You can also tell its not a bot by the amount of actual people on this thread who are a part of steemcleaners telling you its not a bot, that we are just people lol.
Should bots make profit? It depends on the bot- Do you think fighting plagiarism is a worthy cause on steemit? If so, that is cheetahs main function and in order to run it needs to be funded. Do I think the @iliketoast bot or @ionlysaymeep need to profit? That's a matter of personal opinion, I mean I like toast but I'm not sure how much of a payout that thing actually warrants.
As far as what set of rules are used? A good starting point would be this post which outlines what we tend to consider abuse.
Obviously there will be disagreement, as community based volunteers we tend to listen to the feedback we are receiving. For example, an early point of contention was people who simply repost a youtube video without any additional text, commentary, etc.. just a straight link to a youtube video being posted dozens of times a day. At first we considered this spam because where is the effort in just reposting dozens of videos? What does it add? But it became clear that people were really pushing back against this so we let it go now.
Lately the issue seems to be mainly over affiliate and referral links with people split on what is acceptable and when does it become spam.
Well, I'm curious about citations. How do you know if something I'm writing is original or if I simply did a "copy/paste" from another article? That would be a tremendous amount of time for an individual to do google searches for chunks of your sentences to see if it matches another article. Something like that is most efficiently done by a bot.
And then you get into murky areas where, what if I'm not doing a copy/paste from another post I made on my other blog, but I'm still borrowing my own ideas? And if it's my own photo that I took, am I supposed to state that somewhere?
I'm not too worried about "spam" because I can simply "mute" them and I'll never worry about that again.
Also, thanks for trying to clear this up for me :-)
No problem, and luckily all your questions are easily answered. Cheetah is indeed a bot that does just that, scours the internet for text that is copied and pasted. When it detects a match, instead of flagging it, it gives you this message-
Hi! I am a robot. I just upvoted you! I found similar content that readers might be interested in:(link to the post with the same text).
If you are borrowing from your own blog on a regular basis all you have to do is send a message to cheetah that shows you own the other blog and you can be whitelisted so that cheetah ignores those posts coming from that site.Keep in mind, cheetah doesn't flag any of these posts, it just lets the reader know that this material is posted somewhere else online. The bot can't give any context to the situation, thats why we have actual people who run steemcleaners to look at every post before taking any action.
Unfortunately cheetah doesn't catch everything so you are correct, it IS a tremendous amount of effort for the volunteers of steemcleaners who spend their time googling chunks of text to find copied/spun material, doing reverse image searches on plagiarized photos, and using google translate to find all the foreign articles that cheetah cant find, etc..
As far as photos go, sure, if you took the photos on your post simply state that in the post. If you didn't take the photos you use in your post, just link to the source of where they came from. There plenty of sites out there like pixabay that have a ton of photos to use for free.
Steemcleaners generally won't police a few images in a post, even unsourced, so long as they aren't the entirety of the post. If, however, you are posting in the photography tab and trying to pass of photos as your own that are clearly not yours then you can expect a comment.
So, even if I provide a citation for a post, I'm still going to get cheetah paying me a visit, thus getting on someone's radar. Correct?
Initially, it's not being used to call you a cheater (or cheetah...I'm sure this is a slight play-on-words)...but it's your way of "tagging" someone's post for inspection. Correct?
I'm asking because I've cited other news stories before and provided the links to them. And maybe an hour later I get a little visit from cheetah.
Cheetah is just a bot, it doesn't know the context of your post. So long as enough of it is copied from somewhere else cheetah will stop in and comment on it.
Correct, you are not being called a cheater or flagged by cheetah. In order to avoid cheetah you would ideally be writing completely original content, but just because cheetah does comment on your post it doesn't mean that you have done anything wrong.
how were these posts flagged by your team?
no spam no referral links no plagiarism?
No spam no referral links no plagiarism , just abuse by your team.