While I love the idea of fighting plagiarism, and while @cheetah has done it's fair share in fighting it, it seems as of lately, the @cheetah bot's owner has shifted focus in a way that makes me question his/her intentions for the bot.

Two observations:

• Whitelists apparently are no longer updated.
• @cheetah blatantly lies about upvoting now.

Whitelists not updated

If you run a bot that interprets behaviour, like I run the bot that posts the flag war stats, there are bound to be situations warranting for exceptions to the base rules of the code. Sometimes you can create smarter code, but in many cases you will meet to make do with a whitelist. If I ran my bot without a whitelist, @steemcleaners or @adm would get marked as major participant in the rampant flag wars. Whitelists need to be monitored, or be partially turned into grey lists, etc. The main point is a whitelist takes work and a responsible bot owner, something the people behind @cheetah ones seemed to be, will put in the hours.

Quite recently, I was working on a comment-bot statistics scrips, and as expected, a number of regular friendly bots showed up. Some, such as @resteembot as a result of bugs, but others such as @cheetah, I thought, for the simple reason that I hadn't put them on a whitelist yet.

As for @cheetah's whitelist, my own daily Watching The Watchers flag-waving stats daily posts get daily comments from @cheetah. I've tried to communicate a number of times, but comments end up in a black hole. My posts are daily stats and as such tend to be structured rather the same way each day. The data though often differs greatly. When I look at the @cheetah reports page, than at one from a week back, it becomes even more clear how whitelist/greylist maintenance has been zero. Not only is the false positive rate of the bot through the roof at the moment, the same false positive "similar content" links will repeatedly keep popping up. Same for my posts. What type of plagiarism would plagiarize the same source each and every day?

While all of this could all just be plain negligence, there is another reason why @cheetah's owner might choose to keep the false positive rate at artificially high levels, more on that later.

Lying about upvotes

All of the above wouldn't warrant much suspicion if it wasn't for a second observation. @cheetah will comment on posts, claiming it has upvoted the post, where in fact it hasn't. In the past, @cheetah used to upvote posts that it commented on. Today it just blatantly lies about doing upvotes. This could be a bug of course, but let's look at a phenomenon that plagues the steemit ecosystem at the moment first, before we finalize a different hypothesis.

Comment bots, extended definition

A comment bot is a simple money making scheme where a bot the bot would create spurious , broadly applicable and widely applied comments to a large set of posts, acting as if it was genuinely interacting. The goal of comment bots is attracting upvotes on the spurious comments in an attempt to reap profits from them.

More comments means more upvotes. More upvotes means more profit. An upvote bot typically wont upvote the post it comments on. Some will claim they have, like @cheetah does, and some might do minimum power upvotes, as it still might increase the chance of getting an upvote. The business model of comment bots is about huge amounts of spurious comments and upvote reciprocity deception. Sounds familiar?

So is @cheetah using the comment-bot business model now?

I'm not sure to be fair. But if any other bot would show such behaviour, unmaintained whitelists combined with blatantly lying about upvotes, I would probably not even consider giving such a bot a place on the whitelist of a comment-bot stats bot. The evidence against @cheetah is piling up, but given its reputation as a force for good, we must probably also consider the possibility that bugs and negligence might explain these observations. My current guess is that there is a 50/50 chance of @cheatah owners adopting a vote-bot profit strategy against the bot having a bug that, just like the bots whitelist has gone unchecked for way to long, but without any malice.

It is becoming increasingly difficult on steemit to distinguish simple cockups from malice. New users, as my flag war reports show, have their reputations destroyed when orcas downvote cock-ups they interpret as malice, yet at the same time, the capricious behaviour of big fish and big bot owners continues to go unchecked.

Flagging long term false positives?

Something you might consider if like me, every day your posts gets a false positive, lying about upvotes @cheetah comment. But I would argue it's a bad idea. Flagging in general is a bad idea unless you are 110% sure about abusive intent.

Attenuating comment upvotes?

Where downvoting a comment that doesn't have any upvotes constitutes flagging, downvoting a comment that has upvoted can be done purely attenuative. You are not downvoting the author of the post, you are attenuating the strength of an upvote on the post. I am working on a set of easy to use away-bots, including one that attenuates upvotes on comments by comment bots.

Now for a bit of controversy, I would propose that while for comment bot "stats" @cheetah should be whitelisted. But then I would also propose that for as far attenuation of upvotes aimed against comment bots, the intentions of @cheetah's owners shouldn't matter that much. As far as attacking the business model of comment bots is concerned, it is about creating economic incentive to do the right thing. In the case of @cheetah, doing the right thing should include not lying about doing upvotes and doing regular whitelist maintenance to reduce the false positive rate for things like automated statistics posts such as mine.

@cheetah, please show me wrong

I hope I'm 100 wrong about @cheetah having turned a tad evil. So anyone involved with @cheetah, please show me wrong by commenting on this post with arguments against my observations and reasoning rather than with flags. I realize that with this post In putting myself at high risk of becoming another piece of collateral damage to the moods of the capricious orca/whale god's of steemit. I do feel however that steemit needs more little guys who dare to speak and act up against misbehaving big fish. I'm not half as brave as @r0nd0n, @tuvokhl or @fersher in this respect, but their bravery to risk the wrath of our capricious whale gods of steemit did inspire me to dare to write this post, that I am sure will not help me win any popularity contest.