RE: @Whales, @Witnesses, We have to talk!

[neuromancer]

Among the comments I exchanged with other Steemians in my first few weeks on Steemit were discussions around pre-screening of submissions at the time the user clicks Post. While this won't directly address vote abuse/farms it will reduce and make less attractive the submisssion of content that a lot of this voting happens on;

At the time of submission content should be checked and matched against a short tree of criteria with suggestions|warnings presented &/or automatic submission action|rejection, eg:

Criteria

• content components (image, text, both)
• length of content (char count, img count)
• % match of existing content (internet/steemit), via tools similar to checkplagiarism.org & checkplagiarism.org (text), or tineye.com & images.google.com (images, 100% matches only, for obvious reasons)

Advice|Warning

• [Advice] Your submission is very short, containing only X characters. Stimulating and engaging content attracts more attention, greater reward potential, and help Steemit grow into the #1 content platform!
  Edit   Continue
• [Advice] Your submission contains Y image[s][only] [and X characters]. Stimulating and engaging content attracts more attention, greater reward potential, and help Steemit grow into the #1 content platform!
  Edit   Continue
• [Warning] Your submission is a Z% match of existing content: [url_array(≤3)]. Steemit thrives on original content, unoriginal content may attract less attention, lesser reward potential, negative impact on reputation, potential copyright legal action, and reflect poorly on Stemit's reputation. Please consider re-writing your submission using quote markdown and credit original authors where necessary. Rewards for this submission will be reduced by Z%
  Edit   Continue
• [Warning] Your are attempting to submit work that is a 100% match of existing content: [url_array(≤3)]. Please consider re-writing your submission using quote markdown and credit original authors where necessary. If you proceed a link to the existing content will be submitted instead and potential reward will be reduced to 0
  Edit   Continue

Automatic Actions

• Post reward reduced by Z% match
• System warning included on post comments (eg: @cheetah -like statement with Z% match & URL list)
• Post reward prevented
• Post content substituted with URL link[s] & warning comment included on post comments

Sounds like a job for RegEx :P

Comments

[sircork]

I love the regex meme, and your ideas are not too shabby either.

[neuromancer]

I am very fond of XKCD, and that meme is pretty good too, so's this.

There really should be some screening & mitigation done at submission time before block chain commit, right now that's occurring after the fact and the result is self evident.

Such measures are never expected to be a 100% perfect robot nanny (deference to blind faith is misplaced anyway) because they would need to be somewhat lenient and permissive to reduce false positives becoming an obstacle, but it would help mitigate some blatant plagiarism and tarpit submission of junk waffle posts while they are parsed & compared against criteria and again while the submitter considers editing and again if they choose to edit, consider:

• sircork spends 37 minutes writing an article then submits it
• system returns message of 13% match for URL
• sircork spends 2 minutes using markdown to indicate quoted portions of text
• sircork submits revised article
• article written to block chain

I can spend upwards of 5-7 hours on some of my articles that require writing/testing code, cross-browser compatibility checking, fact checking, collecting & verifying info/resources, capturing images of steps/results then editing them, and finally composing in markdown. I wouldn't care if I had to spend a few minutes more at submission time. But consider:

• user sees eye catching content & copies it
• user pastes content into steemit & submits
• user paid bot upvote army votes
• repeat X number times per hour every day

The article parsing will slow this, the system response (advice/warning) will slow this, even if they ignore it and hit Continue the article may be branded with the warning comment containing URLs of matching content & receive less or no reward.

The practice becomes less profitable and enticing, it may even become a nuisance to those who practice it, the quanta of these types of submissions is reduced and more of the reward pool remains.

As stated above, such measures aren't regarded as a 100% perfect magical digital genie that will fix everything and relieve humans of custodial duties or responsibility for actions, but rather a helper tool that does what it's able to, safely within a given level of certainty and reliability and no more, that stems the flood a little, making the task more achievable.

[sircork]

Off to utopian.io you go to submit a condenser change req!