To Flag Or Not To Flag? That's the Question...

♫ ♫ I flagged a guy and I liked i-it ... ♫♫
I'm not the 'flagger'-type, but I found out that there are things you simply can't ignore...

Copycats

While I was scrolling through the 'cryptocurrency' tag stream yesterday, opening some posts that looked promising, I couldn't help noticing that the Cheetah bot is working overtime these days. Apparently, it is a new trend to just copy an article published on a big news site, and use it as a SteemIt post.

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But Cheetah is smart: she uncovers all of those posts in no time, leaving a short, informative message that states that duplicate content has been detected.

According to @anyx, the creator of the Cheetah bot, the comment is for informative purposes only.
It is supposed to make the author aware that he should not be copy/pasting, but it is also meant as a warning towards the reader that the article might be plagiarism, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether to upvote or not.

You can find out more about how Cheetah works in this article

If the user keeps posting copy/paste content, this will be investigated by Steemcleaners, who can decide to put someone on the blacklist or not.

It's not yet clear to me how Cheetah and Steemcleaners handle a situation where a user consistently posts articles from news sites but always adds a link to the source, but I'm trying to find that out.

I'll tell you more about Steemcleaners below.

Spam, Actual & Real Spam

While I was reading a couple of posts, I noticed that someone had posted an identical, off-topic comment underneath every single one of those posts. The comment was just a plain promotion for some token and the poster didn't even try to hide his affiliate link.

When I checked out his account, I discovered he had posted the same comment more than 20 times in 1 hour.

These last few weeks, we have been discussing whether low-quality comments like 'Thanks! Please follow' should be considered to be spam or not, but looking at what this guy did, I instantly realized we have been waisting our precious time.

This was 'the real thing' - these comments had the word SPAM written all over them...

Flagging

Ever since I signed up for SteemIt I had been hearing about flagging. Some people promote it, other people think it's a bad idea.

I had never flagged anything myself, but when I saw this shameless spamming I thought that if there ever would be a good time to flag, this would be it.

So I clicked the little flag icon next to the comment and this popup appeared:

Clear enough, I thought and I clicked the 'FLAG' button. I went over to his second comment and flagged that too. Fortunately, there was this little voice in my head saying there was no need to flag all of his comments.

I'm glad I listened to that little voice because what the popup doesn't tell you is that flagging a post depletes your voting power at the same rate as upvoting at 100%!

I think it's more important to reward someone for writing a great post with an upvote than to spend my precious Voting Power on those spammers.

As a result, flagging is off the table.

But reporting abuse is not!

SteemCleaners

I started doing some research on SteemCleaners.

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I already knew that the Steemcleaners are a group of volunteers who are trying to keep SteemIt free from plagiarism, spam, identity theft and all other malicious practices. They work together with the Cheetah bot to fight all forms of abuse.

The Steemcleaners account publishes a public log of cases every week, and they're even rewarding people that help them to fight abuse.

We offer a subjective reward system for members and reputable abuse hunters in the community -- rewards given from donors, and upvotes on the weekly logs or announcement posts, will be grouped into a “pie”, and group members will vote on a distribution of the reward. Steem power in the account will remain, to improve our ability to flag clear abuse. Even as a non-member, you can receive part of the reward if you consistently help us fight abuse!
^{@steemcleaners}

To participate in the war against abuse you can use the abuse reporting form on their website.

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Before you start reporting abuse, it's important you read the Abuse Guide first.

In this guide is stated what is considered to be abuse and what not. You should make yourself familiar with this info, so you won't make the mistake of abusing the abuse reporting form.

GOOD TO KNOW: When you submit the form, and you want to make a chance on being rewarded, you're required to fill in your username in the first two fields. There's no need to worry about this. Your username will not be made public - it is for internal use only.

You can also find and contact the Steemcleaners on their Discord channel or on SteemIt chat.

Chat Channels:
#Steemcleaners-public - use this channel to talk to the public steemcleaner members about the group

#SteemItAbuse - use this channel to discuss all forms of abuse on Steemit.com.

#SteemItAbuse-Appeals - use this channel to submit an appeal if you have been downvoted by Steemcleaners of been blacklisted by Cheetah.

Please note that all reporting should be done by sending the abuse reporting form on the website.

I'll be showing you how you can avoid being tagged by Cheetah in one of my next posts.

Do You Flag Or Not? Let Me Know Why (Not)!

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