An Overview of Initiatives to Prevent and Mitigate Abuse.

Over the past few months @newsteem has covered spam fighting, plagiarism detection, and uncovering abuse of the rewards pool in general. Before listing all of those articles here, for easy reference, why not go back to where it started.

On August 14, 2017 @stellabelle wrote this post:

• Steemit is a Test

In it she says:

Steemit is made up of social fabric. This is not really a commodity culture where the best idea wins. Those Steemians who focus their efforts equally on building social bonds plus thinking in deep ways about things that affect tons of people are the ones who do well on here.

She goes on to say that people are overly dependent on Steemit Inc for solving the problems that arise on Steem. We have been given a gift! This is an incredible opportunity for us to actually get paid for creating content! It's not easy, it takes work, dedication, social bonds, and thinking about what the community needs. However, there are those who would like to copy content from the interweb, and get paid. There are scammers, plagiarists, abusers, and the like. You can get paid for creating content, unless the spammers get it first.

That post inspired me with the imperative to support the people working to protect my ability to get paid for creating content. What follows is a series of posts that I have written, co-written, edited, and helped to bring to fruition. I am very grateful for the opportunity Steem provides. I am also grateful for the people who work tirelessly to make sure that we actually get rewarded. If it weren't for these people, and many others who have not been detailed in these posts, STEEM would have no value. We are the future! Content Creators, Developers, Visionaries. Without further ado:

Support those who are Working To Expose Abuse, and Protect the Rewards Pool.

• @mikepm74 - Save the Rewards Pool Part 1 With @PaulaG

"I love data and analytics. If you look at centralised social media platforms I can only get the data that they will allow me have. So real and optimal analysis can be difficult. But with Steemit everything is transparent. All of the data is there." - @paulag

• @inquiringtimes - Save the Rewards Pool Part 2 with @SherlockHolmes

"I have been a lurker on this platform since it's early days and I have been one of the many passive bystanders for way too long. Something needed to be done, whenever I tried bringing awareness to abuse, it was often shunned with disinterest and I had to go to lengths to prove my point. One day I had enough, so I decided it was time to make my findings publicly known, in the hopes of getting more attention that way. I guess it did kind of work out so far." - @sherlockholmes

• @mikepm74 - Save the Rewards Pool Part 3 with @steemcleaners

"For those who are unfamiliar with the group, Steemcleaners goal is to track down those who would pass off other people's work as their own for profit, scam, or spam the good citizens of Steem. They use the tools at their disposal to educate and/or flag abusive content to try and make life difficult for those who are trying to cheat the system." - @mikepm74

• @narconaught - Welcome MSP Anti Abuse Team!

"Our own guardian Steem angel @discordiant has created the Anti Abuse Team as of August 28th." - @narconaught

The above artcle shows the efforts led by @discordiant to keep MSP and it's Bots free from spam and abuse.

• @mikepm74 - Support those working to save the Rewards Pool, With Witness #20 @lukestokes

"I think witnesses have always taken on the responsibility to secure the blockchain, and that includes helping to deal with abuse. I don't think they should ever allow censorship on the blockchain, but they should take advantage of the tools we have such as flagging to protect their own investments and the value the community is building."

• @inquiringtimes - Interview with @anyx Witness #9 Founder of @Cheetah and @SteemCleaners

"As an academic, plagiarism is something I take very seriously. Thus, once I started watching people post, it became pretty clear to me that Steemit was doomed to fail if it didn't have some way to tackle abuse. I recognized that investors would want no part in a site that is best known for plagiarism, DMCA requests, and a dumpster of copy-paste-everything. But I also recognized the potential; if we could curb abuse, and actually find a new decentralized way to reward content creators that breaks the chains of the traditional publishing route, we would have something special. So, I started investing my time in the original steemitabuse channel in slack... and the rest is history. -@anyx"

• @shello - What is Spaminator? Part 1

"My goal is to root it out and remove the financial rewards of those spamming for profit." -@patrice

• @inquiringtimes - What is Spaminator? Part 2. Interview with @patrice

"I was really irritated after one too many bot spam comments. I really just made the account on a lark to go and comment anonymously in reply to spam. A couple days later I got a tip on the @dart/@ecoworld comment farm and decided to use @spaminator to report it to the community." -@patrice

Thank YOU!!!!!!

I am so grateful to all of you for doing what you can to protect the rewards of legitimate users. Thank you to all of the content creators out there for making this platform an engaging place to be. If it wasn't for all of the amazing people who put sweat and dedication into creating, there would be nothing to protect. A big shoutout to all of the investors out there! You help to create an incentive for us to continue making quality contributions to the blockchain, we'll try not to let you down!

I hope that this is inspiring, and hopefully some of my dear readers will become engaged in spam\scamfighting efforts, and help to promote the people who are already doing it.

There is still plenty more work to be done on this front, and plenty of people who are working hard on these matters that we have not yet written about.

Feel free to contact me via discord, or steemit.chat, if you'd like to collaborate on future #newsteem articles.

With Love - @inquiringtimes