Is Steemit actually a social media network, or is it just a blogging platform? I see many people complaining "this guy is submitting content that isn't his own!". Well, that's how other social media sites like reddit or stumbleupon work. What is stumbleupon without external content? As far as I'm aware this site is not just for blogs. Well, as far as I know, on other social media sites it's not illegal to submit external content.
On the site at the moment we only have one submit option "Submit a Story" i.e. submit text. Maybe the developers want to keep it that way, but wouldn't a "Submit a Link" option be pretty valuable? That way users get credit for their find/submission, the original creator gets views and credits, it's win win. Surely we can't just ban people from submitting external content. I think the site would be poor without external content.
TL/DR: Create a "Submit a Link" option.
A person can already copy external content to steemit if they are the creators of the content like @talanhorne.
Many like me will make comments, critiques, reviews, etc on external posts and include quotes and links to the post. Which is covered under "fair use". For example: https://steemit.com/marijuana/@patrice/sorry-hugo-colorado-there-s-no-marijuana-thc-in-the-water-afterall
What people are doing is copy/paste entire articles from external sites without adding anything anything of value, sometimes they don't even provide the source wanting people to believe that the article was their work.
Steemit is about rewarding community members for creating great content and rewarding community members for recognizing that content. Not to provide another platform to drive traffic and create revenue for external sites such as Coindesk, CNN, FOX, Facebook, etc
I don't think there is a good reason to allow users to simply submit links to external sites. Why upvote/reward someone for just submitting links to articles on external sites. Especially when you have 100 other people submitting the same links.
I have my own website with its own wordpress blog. I repost a lot of stuff from that onto Steemit, but since I created that content to begin with, I don't see a problem.
Are people getting banned from Steemit for posting others content? Thanks