RE: Plagiarism on Steemit. A Look at @jpiper20
I'm flagging this. Not because I support plagiarism. Nor do I have anything against @pfunk reporting on it (in fact I support him finding it and reporting it). However, I think it is unnecessary and harmful for this to be the second ranked and rewarded post on the entire site. I would not flag it if doing so sent it negative or if it were already a modestly-rewarded post in an obscure "meta" section on site-specific issues.
This is not even a summary or status report about rampant plagiarism (which I don't think exists). It is a post about one particular incident out of thousands of users and posts most of whom behave in a reasonable and responsible manner (non-plagiarizing). It was handled by flagging the user, who has even admitted his mistakes and apologized, and ongoing reasonable platform-wide efforts to discourage and limit the effects of plagiarism exist and I support them. So I see this is largely sensationalism and blowing the issue way out of proportion in a manner that is misleading about the current status of the issue.
I am disappointed by this. As you know I dealt with another dishonest plagiarist last weekend, and this second incident in the same week was enough to put me over the edge into drawing attention to the issue. I had a few objectives with this post, and you can see that reflected above as it's written.
Objective 1: Make the issue of plagiarism more known, make it more clear that it's not acceptable here, and make the case that it's defrauding us, the stakeholders in Steem.
2: Shine light on a part-time plagiarist who has managed to get to a high enough profile and reputation that it comes as a big surprise to some people. See the other comments here for examples. I did what I could to not sensationalize it. I actually don't see what you see as sensational. I edited in @jpiper20's response in individual cases where appropriate, and made sure to mention that everything about him wasn't false. I think I was fair.
3: Ask for more community support for fighting back against this kind abuse. Maybe most large stakeholders are completely pessimistic about being able to fight it. I'm not. It's impossible to prevent every bit of fraud but it's very possible to reduce it, even to a minimum. As the platform grows, the amount of people looking for abuse will need to grow with it.
Furthermore the liquid rewards from this post are to be shared with the three people who put their own time into uncovering and looking into this issue. I acknowledge you personally contribute quite a lot to SteemCleaners and I appreciate that on behalf of them. But the people who look into these things are under-rewarded for doing hard work trying to keep Steemit a valuable platform (and thus Steem a valuable network) by addressing stuff like this.
And finally if your issue was with this being on the trending list, voting on it has only put it on the list for longer.
There is a longer term view here. When (some) people vote up these sorts of posts they are betting on curation rewards, which are greatly reduced by subsequent downvotes. My hope is that future posts on these sorts of operational matters can get more modest voting, and not at the extreme upper end of the range. Yes, I like the idea of people being rewarded for write-ups about their work contributing to the well-being of the platform, but in moderation.
I don't see any evidence that the problem isn't sufficiently known nor that the problem is either generally out of control or becoming worse, as I mentioned in my first comment. If that is the claim being made that motivates giving it a lot of attention, then it should be supported by broader statistical data, not one report about one particular incident/individual.
Based on some dismissive reactions from people with large and small stakes to the notion of plagiarism and other abuse bringing the value of their own stake down, it's important to remind anyone reading this of the nature of the Steem network: all accounts are stakeholders. Dishonestly earning posting rewards is fraud against everyone here.
I think your concern about curation rewards is nonsense.
I may have been unclear. I have no concern about the curation rewards themselves. I do want to encourage professional (profit-oriented) voters to consider more carefully in the future what they push to the extreme upper end of reward distribution. Whether that will be successful or not, I can't say for sure, but that won't prevent me from trying.
I still don't see how curation or curation rewards has much to do with anything. Aside from some of the accounts that automatically vote for my posts, I don't think people were voting on this post in the interest of gaining curation rewards.
Maybe abuse reports shouldn't get funded and have a category just for these type of posts? Forgive me if I am being redundant, the comments thread is huge. I am also new to Steemit, for now I only down vote on obvious trolling using ad hominem attacks.
I disagree on the negative effects. From my perspective, it shows the ecosystem is self-policing. I didn't get the sense that there was rampant plagiarism going unchecked in this post.
If there isn't rampant plagiarism (and I agree on that), then this isn't noteworthy, it is just one incident being blown out of proportion. Other sites delete/police abusive posts, but you don't see reports featured on the front page about the fact that some abusive content was removed, you just don't see the abusive content at all. (There might be a mod log or other obscure location that provides transparency for those who seek it out.) We should operate on the same principle.