Our experience of five years anti-Abuse work on Steemit
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Hello dear Steemians,
Today I wanted to share with you what means for us @stef1 and @myskye to check the posts for plagiarism or to check if the user is a real user or maybe this is someone who probably committed an Identity Fraud.
You may wonder why I start talking about that, I got some query from some users on Steemit on this theme and while looking into what is new I noticed that there is now a new account „Steem Watcher“ that is going to start punishing people for any type of abuse.
It is good to know that something like that is present now and of course, would be good to see if it works well. On other hand I am a bit concerned because many users became excited and want to be „Detectives“ and start searching for Abusers but often it can turn into Witch hunting and innocent users will be blamed to be plagiarists.
From our side we wanted to share our experience and only hope that people will take some of our experience and used for them too.
We are a part of World of Xpilar, that is why majority of our time we spend in our community and it is large community so we always have a lot of posts but also we have great team who we can contact and discuss every case with.
Our main subject is Art and Photography, as we started curating these two subjects since beginning and it is now 5 years.
When we see any Art posts we usually go to the user’s blog, normally the person who is doing Art, will:
- mention that in his blog
- often people share their Art website as links on the top of their blog
- normally there will be few Art posts in blog
- the style of works will have something in common
If we see that all the criteria are met then it is likely to be an original art creator but still having their other website links or links to social media, we drop a kind message in one of the website and ask if the user has account on Steemit. Majority have and they confirmed that.
Then he is on our WOX Whitelist.
If none of the above criteria are met, that might be the case that the person is not the one who he pretends so, but still for us it is very important:
- „NOT PROVEN NOT A THIEF“
So we will get in touch with user, either way, leaving comment under his post and also dropping a message in social media or even in Hive blockchain, as it is also one of the tricks such abuser creating a clone account of Hive users in Steemit.
If we get a reply from original Person in Social media/ other blockchain who says that he has no account on Steemit then we still wait for explanation of the suspicious user. We still give him a chance to explain or maybe to admit that he is stolen the identity.
If that not happening then, we confront him with the reply of original user and of course, at this stage the abuser will admit and often apologize.
Those users we label as „Abuser“ but give them a week to change their attitude and if they have done it and started posting normally then the label can be removed.
It is very important to check and have evidence of Fraud before you label anyone as Fraud.
Use social media and other blockchain to check up into support your accusation.
Be polite and patient.
If you do not have experience with any certain field like judgment of Artworks, judgment of Photography, poetry or any other special field then better not to do it.
Do not blindly rely on Plagiarism checking programs. It is only a computer behind that only checks similar words and gives you approximate percent of similarity.
But if the person is a real abuser he will know that the same program have a function that can make the text unique by re-phrasing the sentences.
Do not forget that using the same program:
When you decided to fight plagiarism, then be ready to spend hours checking the articles after the program has given you any percent.
I hope that will give the people some idea what means to do anti-plagiarism search and hope that the admin behind „Steem Watcher“ will also be sensible before giving Downvotes to suspicious users.
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