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:
How can anyone tell if it's a bot?
If it's a bot, do you think it should still make a profit?
What set of rules are used to determine if someone plagiarized? Sounds like some of the comments here are saying that they have been unfairly "flagged" when they did nothing wrong. How is that corrected if true?
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.
This makes me very, very sad. I understand the DMCA/Plagiarism striker, but shouldn't the Admins of Steemit operate something like that? To keep the reward pool equally accessible to all? Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but I don't like the idea of spamming then self-upvoting your own posts.
I had seen a list of users who do nearly the same thing, using their obscene vote power to upvote all of their own posts and comments.
Some might say that's just human nature, but I believe greed and egocentrists are learned behaviors.
Hopefully my response, the response from patrice, and the comments from anyx on this post help to give you an idea of why the votes are cast the way they are.
As @orionsbelt mentioned, this a decentralized platform. There is literally nobody who works for steemit that does anything in an official capacity to fight plagiarism or abuse on the platform, it is all done by volunteers.
Edit: upvoting my own post because pjheinz flagged my last one without giving a reason, better safe than sorry with this one :)
I appreciate the open discussion, you'll notice that I haven't flagged you in retaliation because that really doesn't get us anywhere, even though you have flagged 2 of my comments now.
I was answering @lpfaust and his comment asking for more transparency by trying to provide him with more transparency. I am also trying to clear up some misinformation, mainly the fact that you keep calling steemcleaners a bot. As I mentioned in other comments we are not a bot, literally just a group of people.
As far as the blacklist bot goes, I have no idea who runs it but it isn't steemcleaners or anyx. As far as I can tell it just follows cheetah or steemcleaner flags but we have no control over it and frankly no idea who does.
There are no "admins" of steemit, this is decentralized platform working on consensus from witnesses(who keep blockchain alive), if someone should look into this issue then it should be the "witnesses"
Some ppl on steemit show off themselves as golden caped knights, but all they do is loot, loot and loot! Abuse their powers, downvoting ppl they don't like. We should really investigate properly before supporting these kind of guys.
Where the heck do you get your figures? They are so far off base it isn't even funny.
Steemcleaners $600 a day? Maybe for a week right after hard fork 19 when the rewards were out of whack. Lately we have been lucky to get $200 a day $100 from the daily log and $100 from the comments. Sure we get more if the log is huge and we have to split it into 2 parts.
240 comments a day? They might have been the record for one day but for months there were less than 50 a day usually between 10 and 30. Even if you do the math it comes out nowhere near your figures. 15304 posts over almost a year that's under 45 posts a day average. That's posts and comments combined.
As for the rest of your math it isn't even close to reality. You take no account of the value of steem which was as low as 6 cents for quite awhile.
It's perfectly clear you will do anything to skew your numbers in favor of your argument.
What's crazy is have never seen a post of mine reach over 7 bucks and was only one post. And the only one but hey I'm grateful for the small shares. I could be doing this same thing on Facebook or any other site for free. Only been here a month and a half and imma keep pushing forward.
Wow my friend I'm applauded by your eagerness to bring a real issue to the forefront. Keep one thing in mind though, like every new trending thing it get abused.
One profits from the vast majority while the majority is truest responsible for the work. Sounds exactly like society's selfish tactics. WHO ARE WE TO JUDGE? We are the people and can take action as a whole yet we individually still have some of the same tendencies.
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.
@pjheinz thanks for doing the analysis. Transparency is absolutely necessary.
Personally, I am a bit conflicted about how to react. The reality is Steemit needs some kind of plagiarism bot to prevent abuse and potential issues with DCMA violations, and that bot will require funding to operate, maintain and upgrade. Most programmers will not contribute their skills for free.
Even if we put aside the issues of whether or not a government entity can and should enforce DCMA regs, or even the issue of intellectual property rights, we would be having the same debate about reward pool theft when the copy/paste nonsense begins again and becomes as bad or worse just like it was when Steemit first began last year.
I do agree with your position as it relates to how much is being taken by the self-upvoting, but that issue extends much further than STEEM cleaners and cheetah. How many now are engaged with their bot trains in self upvoting comments?
@patrice mentions it in her response, but to find out why steemcleaners switched to upvoting comments I would recommend looking at this post from transisto and especially the response from anyx.
Basically even though people want to support steemcleaners there are those out there that don't want to see the reports on the trending page. This does make some sense, you want to lead with your best foot forward and a big list of people plagiarizing stuff isn't ideal.
Switching to upvoting comments keeps the reports off the trending page and has a few added benefits as well. It prevents steemcleaner comments from being flagged and having their visibility removed and it also moves them near the top of a post so that people can have all the information before they vote on a potentially plagiarized post.
@fingolfin it makes sense to keep the @steemcleaners of the trending page, so the comment upvoting would be the best way to do that. I can remember when I joined in July what a mess the plagiarism was on Stemit and @anyx was fronting the entire cost of @cheetah out of his own pockets to provide a basic service I would have expected Steemit, Inc would have taken on in light of DCMA issues.
I remember @curie was being pilloried for upvoting their own update posts to the trending page , and the whole "reward pool theft" hate-rants towards Curie were filling the trending page for obscene rewards. In the end, the Curie project opted to refuse payouts on every other post and assume a huge amount of automation. Have @steemcleaners and @cheetah considered a similar approach?
Like fubar said, we can't really automate anything else easily. In this post anyx discusses the costs of running cheetah, I recall him saying that trying to create something to find plagiarized photos would astronomically expensive.
People complain about bots enough as it is. Steemcleaners is not a bot, every post, every comment that the steemcleaners account makes is made by a person. Every post is investigated, commented on, reviewed, and logged by a person and that takes a lot of time and effort. The money made is going right back to all the members of the community(steemcleaners or not) who identify and report abuse. Most of us even use our personal accounts voting power to deal with these issues as well, despite the risk of retaliation. Hell, look at my account, I'm no whale. I use my meager voting power to take care of small issues to save steemcleaners voting power for the really big ones.
You can't automate what we do. If you notice cheetah can miss a lot and there is no easy way to automate photo plg detection. For everything you automate someone will find a way to avoid that automatic detection. It takes human and lots of time.
Curie also has the benifit of voting for curation profit. Something steemcleaners can't do. You see we are getting grilled for 4% upvotes on our comments and most of our voting power goes to flagging which gives no curation rewards.
Very true, these guys are making steemit the most censored and centralized social media site in the world. We need to follow their morals and their religious cult if we have to survive here.
Cheetah posts the same damn thing in every post and these guys and their friends upvote the cheetah comment for rewards
what i miss is the story on how to fight plagiarism and copyright violations instead ? you don't like the bots that warn people , you see it as Spam i've seen worse bots but ok . If those numbers are correct it's a lot of money but at least they are trying to keep the place clean , and nobody works for free these days. i know bank CEOs that make a lot more in a year are you going to mail those people too?
if you really care about honest and equal distribution of the pool , tell me how are we going to educate / fight those people that abuse other peoples content here on steemit ?
it's so easy to not see spam on steemit, you just don't follow those people and if you cut all the crap with these police bots then the problem bots will be easier to root out and people can flag them on there own if they don't like it but when you create an unstoppable organization like steemcleaners then you get the inevitable abuse of power which is what has lead us to this point. the people aka"community" are clearly rising up against steemcleaners. i suggest they take the hint. this post has over a 1000 votes and would like have a large reward were it not for the efforts of certain whales to TAKE THAT REWARD AWAY AKA THEFT!!!! WOW the hypocrisy is outrageous and can not be allowed to continue. the vindictive and thin skinned nature of the people running this thing demands they be stopped. they are clearly not up to the task.
When you're final response to dissent is to silence it, YA YOU FUCKED UP. DEAL WITH IT!
steemcleaners and cheetah are the equivalent of traffic cops, giving you tickets, stealing your property, all the while talking about how they're doing a community service but really they're just enforcing another illegal form of taxation.
If you really think 1100 people voted for this post, you don't understand how any of this works dude... It was one person with a network of 1100+ accounts.
No one will take arguments seriously unless the facts are straight and the argument is laid out logically.
"The people" aren't rising up against steemcleaners. Its just a few, super anti-authority, tax-is-illegal-police-oppression-you're-a-nazi ones, like you.
And its fewer people than you think, too. The pjheinz account is the same user as the blockcodes account (possibly also softgrip). I'd say it's about a dozen people, total, maybe, including you.
and you're suggesting he has 1100 accounts ROFLMMFAO!!! Get Real. It's taking me a lifetime just to get a second account going. where's your proof? i see all kinds of proof from pjheinz in this post but your comments seem like nothing but lame attempts to debunk the FACTS!!! you're lashing out in this manner suggests you are scared that people are discovering the truth. if you had anything to back up your claim i would happily agree with you but you don't and HE DOES! end of story.
if you really expect me to believe this guy set up 1100 accounts for himself you are crazier then i am and that's pretty crazy.
but just to be sure i am going to look into this myself because im tired of it and its the only way to resolve it so you better be telling the truth, BOTH OF YOU ( @pjheinz and @anyx) because now, i'm on it and if there's one thing i'm good at, it's figuring out what the truth is so congratulations you awoke the dragon. better have your ducks in a row because whoever is full of shit here, i'm outing you. my side is the truth, that's it, that's all i care about. i'd rather spend my time elsewhere but this nonsense sickens me and i can out it an end to it so i will. see you in about a week. there's a lot of data to go through because you see, i do know how this works, i just don't yap on about it constantly.
Pj isnt the one with 1000 accounts, they belong to @noganoo and he will tell you as much if you ask him. Go look at noganoos posts and many have 1k upvotes from the same bots. Or look at the comment on this post where he talks about registering 1k accounts.
Here is a recent post about someone else who controls around 1700 accounts, its really not that uncommon.
I'm sorry, but your post is one of the most assinine post I have read here.
"it's so easy to not see spam on steemit,"
I'm guessing you meant that it is easy to see spam on steemit based on the remainder of your post. Yes seeing spam is easy, it is not hard to see when people are spamming a post. @cheetah and @steemcleaners are not, (IMHO), spam.
you just don't follow those people and if you cut all the crap with these police bots then the problem bots will be easier to root out and people can flag them on there own if they don't like it
Oh yes, then when a newbie with 25 rep runs up against an idiotic petulant 50 rep person, who wins that flag war? The 25 Rep person that had a really cool post stolen by a 50 Rep person that posted it as his own, and then flagged the 25 Rep persons post screaming Plagiarism at him?
the people aka"community" are clearly rising up against steemcleaners.
The people? get real, there has only been 158 views of this page. So the question is how many silly assed little bot voters does the poster have. How many auto upvote bots does he control? You think upvotes equate to people? I don't think so.
You are a sour grape, precious little snowflake that thinks the world owes you, you are wrong on so many accounts.
i disagree with you completely. have a nice day. p.s. i could not care less what you think about me. i don't know you, you don't know me, which makes your opinion of me less than worthless. you're just another WHALE ASS KISSER hoping to make some money off of siding with them.
oh hey did you not know you can upvote without reading the article, like everyone does i mean wow if i compared my views with the number of upvotes it would never add up. you guys just love to try and debunk everything talking about how no one knows how this works, only you the masters of the universe know how it works. people like you make me sick to my stomach for about 5 seconds and then i remember, YOU ARE NOTHING! so go ahead chime in with the whales, take the side of the establishment, good luck with that.
It does seem that we are on opposite sides of the fence. You seem to be on the precious little snowflake,(i want, i deserve, if you have it I want it) side. Where as I am firmly entrenched on the side of I do not like plagiarism, (if someone made, created, built something it is theirs) and does not, just because they chose to share it, belong to someone/everyone else. It is still their work and belongs to them, not to you, not to me and not to pjhienz.
oh hey did you not know you can upvote without reading the article
I guess during your intense investigation you missed the part where I pointed out there has only bee 158 views. So yes that is my point about Plagiarism. People ,(those voting without reading), handing over there hard earn money to thieves stealing work from others who receive no, none, nada, zip, back from the asshole thief. I do not follow any robots. I belong to none of the "Clubs", I really don't give a shit about this club that club we can make you rich clubs. "I don't like thieves."
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by isacoin from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, and someguy123. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you like what we're doing please upvote this comment so we can continue to build the community account that's supporting all members.
nice find good call.. i trusted cheetahbot really and downvote those who steal from others.. never knew this and what about to do on this greed? it's really unaccepted. so therefore resteemed
I am still very new here. If I visit a page that @cheetah has a post on, I look very close at the content. If it is plagiarism, i do not visit any of the posters other post/blogs.
Yes I have seen where @cheetah is wrong on a few cases, but I am human and able to discern when a robot is wrong and when a human is a cheat/liar/spammer/Plagiarizer.
@cheetah is rarely wrong, but whats does it matter when it is. I have a brain and can see it made a mistake, and then I look over more of that posters blogs.
As for steemcleaners,I think they are a real aid to steemit. I am tired of looking at a hastag and getting completely irrelevant post. So Steem Clean on.
This actually supports my ultimate point on the whole thing. You are capable of seeing these things for yourself and capable of flagging them yourself so organizations like cheetah should not exist because they stop people like you and me from doing it ourselves, it gets us out of the habit because we don't see it. It's just like government constantly adding all these new services that you need that really you could and SHOULD be doing for yourself. That's why flagging and upvoting exist. So each of us as individuals can take responsibility for OUR community instead of a small group of elites taking it upon themselves and in so doing opening the door to corruption by creating an unstoppable force. I'm not saying they don't do any good. Im saying the good they do should be the responsibility of EVERYONE not just SOME! If it's such an expensive and difficult job which wasn't theirs to do in the first place then WHY?
oh right...
...because it is actually profitable.
I AM NOT 100% ON THIS.
I AM open to arguments to the contrary but that is at this time how it appears to me. I am of course at this time looking into the entire thing much much more closely. I do at the end of the day prefer informed decisions over hearsay.
Last reply along this thread for me I think @aaronmda.
flagging them yourself so organizations like cheetah should not exist because they stop people like you and me from doing it ourselves,
You have a REP score of 54. Plagiarism is not only limited to those of low REP score. At the start of this thread, (my first reply to it), I had a rep score of 33. When I reported my first Copy Paste Plagiarism case to steemcleaners, my REP score was 26. You think as an individual that you can do something about it? I am sorry we are both living on completely different clouds. You cloud says that if you downvote someone with a REP of 72 then they are not ever ever going to retaliate and start down voting your REP into oblivion. Good luck on your way, one man can stand against many, if those many are ants. *I have enjoyed this back and forth, but it is time for me to move on, as you will never understand my belief that we need @cheetah, and I will never understand your belief that we can do it alone.
NOT JUST SOME PEOPLE IN ONE ORGANIZED UNQUESTIONABLE GROUP.
you'll notice the people who actually run this rarely ever even take part in these conversations and when they do they just complain about the "inconvenience", when everything they do to others like myself is unbelievably inconvenient. They seem content to let their lackey's take all the heat and then whale flag you for arguing with them.
Okay, so how do we ALL do it together? Where do we ALL go to say hey that's SPAM, That's Plagiarism. @ionlysaymeep is a bot. All those meeps, could be considered SPAM by some. So where do we ALL go to discuss this matter ad-nauseum, to make an informed decision that yes it's a bot and it's meep's are spam.
I don't think there is a solution to the spam and plagiarism issue. One man's Spam is another man's dinner. Plagiarism is a very very sticky issue on line and always will be, as will the right to free speech will be an issue. When it comes to social networks, there will always be bullies, whiners, and controllers. We need to stay vigilant against all three of these. @cheetah does not care what a person's Reputation score is, unfortunately some of the steemcleaners may be concerned about Reputation score.
I am not sure anyone really RUNS this. @anyx has posted to this thread trying to clarify some things. (she is @cheetah 's creator ) @pjheinz has commented, with bold dots, but at least we know he is reading the thread. As for @ned and @dan, I don't think they really care too much about what happens on the social network side. Anyway, try to have a nice day, because both of us are most likely going to end up being smashed and bashed by the big guys on both sides.
These comments show you haven't done much research and just made some very wrong assumptions. I've downvoted this post by a few dollars to reduce its rewards, as these accusations and misinformation don't benefit anyone.
i appreciate what you do for the music community but in this regard i must protest. first of all you say his facts are wrong. well all you have down is post something he stated with no evidence to the contrary. it would appear this person has done an incredible amount of research actually and you are the one attempting to refute it with flagging and misinformation. I AM NOT SAYING this is the truth but with no supporting evidence to back up your claim i don't see how to see it any other way. everything stated in this post is backed up with links and screencaps from the steem blockchain. are you really saying he made all that up? im asking?
Subtract noganoo's vote spam bots and how many actual people agree?
I could have downvoted it more to remove all rewards. It would still be shown by Steemit. Downvoting more wouldn't cover it up. Steem should not be rewarding poorly researched and hysterical accusations like this, and as a stakeholder I have a say in that.
I've upped my downvote percentage to remove all rewards to demonstrate to you that I haven't covered anything up.
Seems to me if this was to "protect us" then they shouldn't collect any revenue at all!!
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.
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.
Do you mean to say @adm has made 19 Million SBD mostly through self voting and upvoting his own bot?
This makes me very, very sad. I understand the DMCA/Plagiarism striker, but shouldn't the Admins of Steemit operate something like that? To keep the reward pool equally accessible to all? Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but I don't like the idea of spamming then self-upvoting your own posts.
I had seen a list of users who do nearly the same thing, using their obscene vote power to upvote all of their own posts and comments.
Some might say that's just human nature, but I believe greed and egocentrists are learned behaviors.
Hopefully my response, the response from patrice, and the comments from anyx on this post help to give you an idea of why the votes are cast the way they are.
As @orionsbelt mentioned, this a decentralized platform. There is literally nobody who works for steemit that does anything in an official capacity to fight plagiarism or abuse on the platform, it is all done by volunteers.
Edit: upvoting my own post because pjheinz flagged my last one without giving a reason, better safe than sorry with this one :)
I appreciate the open discussion, you'll notice that I haven't flagged you in retaliation because that really doesn't get us anywhere, even though you have flagged 2 of my comments now.
I was answering @lpfaust and his comment asking for more transparency by trying to provide him with more transparency. I am also trying to clear up some misinformation, mainly the fact that you keep calling steemcleaners a bot. As I mentioned in other comments we are not a bot, literally just a group of people.
As far as the blacklist bot goes, I have no idea who runs it but it isn't steemcleaners or anyx. As far as I can tell it just follows cheetah or steemcleaner flags but we have no control over it and frankly no idea who does.
There are no "admins" of steemit, this is decentralized platform working on consensus from witnesses(who keep blockchain alive), if someone should look into this issue then it should be the "witnesses"
gotcha, thank you. I had been getting the impression that Dan and Ned were basically the gatekeepers/bodyguard admin type function.
Wow what an eye opener 😲 you make alot of sense here 👍. Upvoted and resteemed and Followed 👌
Some ppl on steemit show off themselves as golden caped knights, but all they do is loot, loot and loot! Abuse their powers, downvoting ppl they don't like. We should really investigate properly before supporting these kind of guys.
Where the heck do you get your figures? They are so far off base it isn't even funny.
Steemcleaners $600 a day? Maybe for a week right after hard fork 19 when the rewards were out of whack. Lately we have been lucky to get $200 a day $100 from the daily log and $100 from the comments. Sure we get more if the log is huge and we have to split it into 2 parts.
240 comments a day? They might have been the record for one day but for months there were less than 50 a day usually between 10 and 30. Even if you do the math it comes out nowhere near your figures. 15304 posts over almost a year that's under 45 posts a day average. That's posts and comments combined.
As for the rest of your math it isn't even close to reality. You take no account of the value of steem which was as low as 6 cents for quite awhile.
It's perfectly clear you will do anything to skew your numbers in favor of your argument.
proof of self upvoting at my post
link to post
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@stuffy/plexcoin-the-ico-worth-investing
I'm not speaking about, was the flag fair or not, let's leave this out of the equation (post fixed, flag removed, if you still want to know)
What's crazy is have never seen a post of mine reach over 7 bucks and was only one post. And the only one but hey I'm grateful for the small shares. I could be doing this same thing on Facebook or any other site for free. Only been here a month and a half and imma keep pushing forward.
#circleoffriends
Wow my friend I'm applauded by your eagerness to bring a real issue to the forefront. Keep one thing in mind though, like every new trending thing it get abused.
One profits from the vast majority while the majority is truest responsible for the work. Sounds exactly like society's selfish tactics. WHO ARE WE TO JUDGE? We are the people and can take action as a whole yet we individually still have some of the same tendencies.
HOLD YOUR HEAD UP BROTHER IT GETS BETTER👍🏾👍🏾
The streets will flow with the blood of the non-believers...
Upvoted and Resteemed by xx-votesplus, the dropAhead curation team!
Do you want more earnings?
By doing things above you will give us more STEEM POWER (SP) to give you more earnings.
Keep up the good work!
Most recent post: It is official, WE are witnesses!
best definition what bot is. By @fingolfin :
SO true =))
@pjheinz thanks for doing the analysis. Transparency is absolutely necessary.
Personally, I am a bit conflicted about how to react. The reality is Steemit needs some kind of plagiarism bot to prevent abuse and potential issues with DCMA violations, and that bot will require funding to operate, maintain and upgrade. Most programmers will not contribute their skills for free.
Even if we put aside the issues of whether or not a government entity can and should enforce DCMA regs, or even the issue of intellectual property rights, we would be having the same debate about reward pool theft when the copy/paste nonsense begins again and becomes as bad or worse just like it was when Steemit first began last year.
I do agree with your position as it relates to how much is being taken by the self-upvoting, but that issue extends much further than STEEM cleaners and cheetah. How many now are engaged with their bot trains in self upvoting comments?
@patrice mentions it in her response, but to find out why steemcleaners switched to upvoting comments I would recommend looking at this post from transisto and especially the response from anyx.
Basically even though people want to support steemcleaners there are those out there that don't want to see the reports on the trending page. This does make some sense, you want to lead with your best foot forward and a big list of people plagiarizing stuff isn't ideal.
Switching to upvoting comments keeps the reports off the trending page and has a few added benefits as well. It prevents steemcleaner comments from being flagged and having their visibility removed and it also moves them near the top of a post so that people can have all the information before they vote on a potentially plagiarized post.
@fingolfin it makes sense to keep the @steemcleaners of the trending page, so the comment upvoting would be the best way to do that. I can remember when I joined in July what a mess the plagiarism was on Stemit and @anyx was fronting the entire cost of @cheetah out of his own pockets to provide a basic service I would have expected Steemit, Inc would have taken on in light of DCMA issues.
I remember @curie was being pilloried for upvoting their own update posts to the trending page , and the whole "reward pool theft" hate-rants towards Curie were filling the trending page for obscene rewards. In the end, the Curie project opted to refuse payouts on every other post and assume a huge amount of automation. Have @steemcleaners and @cheetah considered a similar approach?
Like fubar said, we can't really automate anything else easily. In this post anyx discusses the costs of running cheetah, I recall him saying that trying to create something to find plagiarized photos would astronomically expensive.
People complain about bots enough as it is. Steemcleaners is not a bot, every post, every comment that the steemcleaners account makes is made by a person. Every post is investigated, commented on, reviewed, and logged by a person and that takes a lot of time and effort. The money made is going right back to all the members of the community(steemcleaners or not) who identify and report abuse. Most of us even use our personal accounts voting power to deal with these issues as well, despite the risk of retaliation. Hell, look at my account, I'm no whale. I use my meager voting power to take care of small issues to save steemcleaners voting power for the really big ones.
You can't automate what we do. If you notice cheetah can miss a lot and there is no easy way to automate photo plg detection. For everything you automate someone will find a way to avoid that automatic detection. It takes human and lots of time.
Curie also has the benifit of voting for curation profit. Something steemcleaners can't do. You see we are getting grilled for 4% upvotes on our comments and most of our voting power goes to flagging which gives no curation rewards.
Very true, these guys are making steemit the most censored and centralized social media site in the world. We need to follow their morals and their religious cult if we have to survive here.
Cheetah posts the same damn thing in every post and these guys and their friends upvote the cheetah comment for rewards
This post received a 4.7% upvote from @randowhale thanks to @softgrip! For more information, click here!
you must give me my vote or give me money back
randowhale owns me money or a vote but I receive non of them
what i miss is the story on how to fight plagiarism and copyright violations instead ? you don't like the bots that warn people , you see it as Spam i've seen worse bots but ok . If those numbers are correct it's a lot of money but at least they are trying to keep the place clean , and nobody works for free these days. i know bank CEOs that make a lot more in a year are you going to mail those people too?
if you really care about honest and equal distribution of the pool , tell me how are we going to educate / fight those people that abuse other peoples content here on steemit ?
it's so easy to not see spam on steemit, you just don't follow those people and if you cut all the crap with these police bots then the problem bots will be easier to root out and people can flag them on there own if they don't like it but when you create an unstoppable organization like steemcleaners then you get the inevitable abuse of power which is what has lead us to this point. the people aka"community" are clearly rising up against steemcleaners. i suggest they take the hint. this post has over a 1000 votes and would like have a large reward were it not for the efforts of certain whales to TAKE THAT REWARD AWAY AKA THEFT!!!! WOW the hypocrisy is outrageous and can not be allowed to continue. the vindictive and thin skinned nature of the people running this thing demands they be stopped. they are clearly not up to the task.
When you're final response to dissent is to silence it, YA YOU FUCKED UP. DEAL WITH IT!
steemcleaners and cheetah are the equivalent of traffic cops, giving you tickets, stealing your property, all the while talking about how they're doing a community service but really they're just enforcing another illegal form of taxation.
If you really think 1100 people voted for this post, you don't understand how any of this works dude... It was one person with a network of 1100+ accounts.
No one will take arguments seriously unless the facts are straight and the argument is laid out logically.
"The people" aren't rising up against steemcleaners. Its just a few, super anti-authority, tax-is-illegal-police-oppression-you're-a-nazi ones, like you.
And its fewer people than you think, too. The pjheinz account is the same user as the blockcodes account (possibly also softgrip). I'd say it's about a dozen people, total, maybe, including you.
oh so now you're name calling LOL well isn't this a switch
and you're suggesting he has 1100 accounts ROFLMMFAO!!! Get Real. It's taking me a lifetime just to get a second account going. where's your proof? i see all kinds of proof from pjheinz in this post but your comments seem like nothing but lame attempts to debunk the FACTS!!! you're lashing out in this manner suggests you are scared that people are discovering the truth. if you had anything to back up your claim i would happily agree with you but you don't and HE DOES! end of story.
if you really expect me to believe this guy set up 1100 accounts for himself you are crazier then i am and that's pretty crazy.
but just to be sure i am going to look into this myself because im tired of it and its the only way to resolve it so you better be telling the truth, BOTH OF YOU ( @pjheinz and @anyx) because now, i'm on it and if there's one thing i'm good at, it's figuring out what the truth is so congratulations you awoke the dragon. better have your ducks in a row because whoever is full of shit here, i'm outing you. my side is the truth, that's it, that's all i care about. i'd rather spend my time elsewhere but this nonsense sickens me and i can out it an end to it so i will. see you in about a week. there's a lot of data to go through because you see, i do know how this works, i just don't yap on about it constantly.
Pj isnt the one with 1000 accounts, they belong to @noganoo and he will tell you as much if you ask him. Go look at noganoos posts and many have 1k upvotes from the same bots. Or look at the comment on this post where he talks about registering 1k accounts.
Here is a recent post about someone else who controls around 1700 accounts, its really not that uncommon.
thank you for this information, it will be included in my report.
Happy to provide facts :)
https://steemit.com/steemit/@noganoo/so-people-are-upset-with-me-for-registering-1000-steemit-accounts-when-abit-stole-35-million-dollars-from-the-internal-market
I'm sorry, but your post is one of the most assinine post I have read here.
I'm guessing you meant that it is easy to see spam on steemit based on the remainder of your post. Yes seeing spam is easy, it is not hard to see when people are spamming a post. @cheetah and @steemcleaners are not, (IMHO), spam.
Oh yes, then when a newbie with 25 rep runs up against an idiotic petulant 50 rep person, who wins that flag war? The 25 Rep person that had a really cool post stolen by a 50 Rep person that posted it as his own, and then flagged the 25 Rep persons post screaming Plagiarism at him?
The people? get real, there has only been 158 views of this page. So the question is how many silly assed little bot voters does the poster have. How many auto upvote bots does he control? You think upvotes equate to people? I don't think so.
You are a sour grape, precious little snowflake that thinks the world owes you, you are wrong on so many accounts.
i disagree with you completely. have a nice day. p.s. i could not care less what you think about me. i don't know you, you don't know me, which makes your opinion of me less than worthless. you're just another WHALE ASS KISSER hoping to make some money off of siding with them.
oh hey did you not know you can upvote without reading the article, like everyone does i mean wow if i compared my views with the number of upvotes it would never add up. you guys just love to try and debunk everything talking about how no one knows how this works, only you the masters of the universe know how it works. people like you make me sick to my stomach for about 5 seconds and then i remember, YOU ARE NOTHING! so go ahead chime in with the whales, take the side of the establishment, good luck with that.
It does seem that we are on opposite sides of the fence. You seem to be on the precious little snowflake,(i want, i deserve, if you have it I want it) side. Where as I am firmly entrenched on the side of I do not like plagiarism, (if someone made, created, built something it is theirs) and does not, just because they chose to share it, belong to someone/everyone else. It is still their work and belongs to them, not to you, not to me and not to pjhienz.
I guess during your intense investigation you missed the part where I pointed out there has only bee 158 views. So yes that is my point about Plagiarism. People ,(those voting without reading), handing over there hard earn money to thieves stealing work from others who receive no, none, nada, zip, back from the asshole thief. I do not follow any robots. I belong to none of the "Clubs", I really don't give a shit about this club that club we can make you rich clubs. "I don't like thieves."
I know here I am again, at any rate I find that I had just one more thing to say. look at this post:
and then you tell me you really think a person with a small Reputation score can honestly make a difference . I think not.
You have something that is so important for everyone to know. thanks a lot!
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by isacoin from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, and someguy123. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you like what we're doing please upvote this comment so we can continue to build the community account that's supporting all members.
This post has received a 0.78 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @banjo.
nice find good call.. i trusted cheetahbot really and downvote those who steal from others.. never knew this and what about to do on this greed? it's really unaccepted. so therefore resteemed
inspiring
meep
lol.....still funny.
meep
I am still very new here. If I visit a page that @cheetah has a post on, I look very close at the content. If it is plagiarism, i do not visit any of the posters other post/blogs.
Yes I have seen where @cheetah is wrong on a few cases, but I am human and able to discern when a robot is wrong and when a human is a cheat/liar/spammer/Plagiarizer.
@cheetah is rarely wrong, but whats does it matter when it is. I have a brain and can see it made a mistake, and then I look over more of that posters blogs.
As for steemcleaners,I think they are a real aid to steemit. I am tired of looking at a hastag and getting completely irrelevant post. So Steem Clean on.
This actually supports my ultimate point on the whole thing. You are capable of seeing these things for yourself and capable of flagging them yourself so organizations like cheetah should not exist because they stop people like you and me from doing it ourselves, it gets us out of the habit because we don't see it. It's just like government constantly adding all these new services that you need that really you could and SHOULD be doing for yourself. That's why flagging and upvoting exist. So each of us as individuals can take responsibility for OUR community instead of a small group of elites taking it upon themselves and in so doing opening the door to corruption by creating an unstoppable force. I'm not saying they don't do any good. Im saying the good they do should be the responsibility of EVERYONE not just SOME! If it's such an expensive and difficult job which wasn't theirs to do in the first place then WHY?
oh right...
...because it is actually profitable.
I AM NOT 100% ON THIS.
I AM open to arguments to the contrary but that is at this time how it appears to me. I am of course at this time looking into the entire thing much much more closely. I do at the end of the day prefer informed decisions over hearsay.
Last reply along this thread for me I think @aaronmda.
you missed the point,
WE DON'T DO IT ALONE.
WE ALL DO IT TOGETHER
NOT JUST SOME PEOPLE IN ONE ORGANIZED UNQUESTIONABLE GROUP.
you'll notice the people who actually run this rarely ever even take part in these conversations and when they do they just complain about the "inconvenience", when everything they do to others like myself is unbelievably inconvenient. They seem content to let their lackey's take all the heat and then whale flag you for arguing with them.
I feel like there have been a lot of comments on this thread from the people involved trying to answer any of the questions raised.
involved yes....running it, no
nobody runs steemcleaners, its a group of people
Okay, so how do we ALL do it together? Where do we ALL go to say hey that's SPAM, That's Plagiarism.
@ionlysaymeep is a bot. All those meeps, could be considered SPAM by some. So where do we ALL go to discuss this matter ad-nauseum, to make an informed decision that yes it's a bot and it's meep's are spam.
I don't think there is a solution to the spam and plagiarism issue. One man's Spam is another man's dinner. Plagiarism is a very very sticky issue on line and always will be, as will the right to free speech will be an issue. When it comes to social networks, there will always be bullies, whiners, and controllers. We need to stay vigilant against all three of these. @cheetah does not care what a person's Reputation score is, unfortunately some of the steemcleaners may be concerned about Reputation score.
I am not sure anyone really RUNS this. @anyx has posted to this thread trying to clarify some things. (she is @cheetah 's creator )
@pjheinz has commented, with bold dots, but at least we know he is reading the thread. As for @ned and @dan, I don't think they really care too much about what happens on the social network side. Anyway, try to have a nice day, because both of us are most likely going to end up being smashed and bashed by the big guys on both sides.
Before throwing wild and inaccurate accusations out there, why don't you get your facts straight?
These comments show you haven't done much research and just made some very wrong assumptions. I've downvoted this post by a few dollars to reduce its rewards, as these accusations and misinformation don't benefit anyone.
i appreciate what you do for the music community but in this regard i must protest. first of all you say his facts are wrong. well all you have down is post something he stated with no evidence to the contrary. it would appear this person has done an incredible amount of research actually and you are the one attempting to refute it with flagging and misinformation. I AM NOT SAYING this is the truth but with no supporting evidence to back up your claim i don't see how to see it any other way. everything stated in this post is backed up with links and screencaps from the steem blockchain. are you really saying he made all that up? im asking?
Not really. I didn't feel the need to respond in detail to ignorance. Look for @anyx's comment here.
ya well just calling something "ignorant" is not nor will it ever be good enough for me. it's a cop out and suggests you have nothing to back it up.
Subtract noganoo's vote spam bots and how many actual people agree?
I could have downvoted it more to remove all rewards. It would still be shown by Steemit. Downvoting more wouldn't cover it up. Steem should not be rewarding poorly researched and hysterical accusations like this, and as a stakeholder I have a say in that.
I've upped my downvote percentage to remove all rewards to demonstrate to you that I haven't covered anything up.