Steemit is an ancient and long established art form, with a widely accepted set of guidelines as to what is acceptable. These rules go back more than 100 days, so are carved in stone.
One of the first rules is that anyone who has been posting stuff on Steemit for more than 50 days can comment about what is good Steemit etiquette. So I’m going to exercise this right to expound, and do an entire post about good etiquette.
Differing View Points
I think it is good etiquette to accept that people on Steemit have differing view points about a wide range of subjects. For example, while most people on Steemit agree that the future of America depends upon the rightful selection of the new great leader Hillary Clinton, it needs to be accepted that there are some people on Steemit who believe a better future for America would lie with Donald Trump.
And really pushing the boundaries here, there are even a few people on Steemit who think that there are fundamental issues that neither Clinton nor Trump have the ability to resolve. But I believe even view points this radical and diverse have the right to exist on Steemit.
And now for a really divisive idea.
Different Opinions About Image Use
I think it is good etiquette on Steemit to accept that Steemit users have differing opinions on what is acceptable use of images that have been found on the internet. At one extreme, there are those who believe that every image posted must have a link to the webpage where it was copied from, and that any failure to do so needs to have comments left below the post.
At the other extreme, there are those who believe that the vast majority of images found using searches like Google Images have been copied and posted from one end of the internet to the other, so unless you took the photo or designed the image yourself, you don’t actually have a hope in hell of determining where the image really originated from.
And probably most people don’t really give a toss, but are simply slapping in image credits to make it look like they are conforming to the “rules”.
Posting the first URL you came across when you searched for the image is a bit like going to the beach, picking the first grain of sand that gets lodged in your crack, and claiming it contains the origin of the universe. Anyone who is into chaos theory will be open to this idea, but the point I’m aiming for here is that most images have many thousands of online sources and randomly linking to one doesn’t make it the true origin. (Now I’m wondering if the overwhelming desire to credit image sources might be a religious thing.)
One of the key things about Steemit is that it is a place for posting original content. And I think it IS important to make it clear what is your own content and what is copied. But this can usually be done without attempting to provide “sources” for all the copied images.
Another issue here is that if we all limit our picture choices to sites like Pixabay, it does reduce the pool of images posted on Steemit, but the original creators will get no payment for any of them anyway, because Pixabay images are all copyright free.
Meanwhile, if we avoid copying images from Google Image searches, the original creators also get no benefit, so when you restrict your choice of images for your Steemit posts, nobody actually gains from this.
It’s my own viewpoint that it’s good etiquette to make it clear that that any opinion of what is good etiquette is only a personal viewpoint. And it’s also my own viewpoint that asking that everyone else posts URLs below every image they copy and paste is bollocks. But that’s just my own viewpoint, and I think it’s good etiquette to accept that there are differing viewpoints on this issue.
All this blathering on about images and etiquette was brought on by some comments about image links that I disagreed with, but that’s my lot, all my steem is vented now and I have some totally different stuff I want to post about next.
SIFT666 aka Ian Gregson from Wellington, New Zealand, is the world’s foremost authority on Chaos Theory and works full time as a professional social etiquette advisor.
In between being commissioned to post articles on Steemit and developing new ways to use sand grains, he is currently developing a new website portal to rival Steemit called http://www.frot.co.nz where he is testing out a new feature called “refrotting” that may revolutionise blogging and overcome any need to produce new content.
Apart from the image above, which is one of my own photos, all the images on this post were either copied from my own image library which has about 20000 images randomly downloaded from the internet over the past 18 years, or I just found them now using Google image search.
If you would like to find other sources for any of them I highly recommend doing a reverse Google image search - just don’t be surprised if you find say 20 billion of them
As to where any of them really originated from, I think the internet has been interbreeding for decades, and the idea that we can work out the original source for most images is an idealistic myth.
There are two sides to this position, but even as a person producing original art and photography myself, my opinion is that gate has long been open, and the horse has bolted. So that is why I’m buggered if I’m going to go through the pretence of crediting the supposed original sources of all the images I use on my Steemit posts.
