Support those working to expose abuse, and save the rewards pool!! ...

Recently, #Newsteem was able to interview @SherlockHolmes who has made a name for himself bringing down some pretty deplorable abusers of the Steem Reward System. See that article [HERE]. Today we are thrilled to bring you another portion of the abuse fighting team on Steem as we get to speak with three of the most active @steemcleaners.

^{(Image Source: Richard Patterson)}

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.

Join us as we sit down with @patrice, @logic & @fubar-bdhr and talk about Steemcleaners and what this group does in support of our community.

Interview:

#NewsTeem: Steemcleaners Celebrated their one year Steemiversary on August 23rd. That is an awful long time to dedicate yourselves to a pretty thankless task. Considering every time you manage to clean up one account, three more pop up to take it's place like a Hydra. What keeps the group motivated to keep working for the common good of Steem?

@patrice:

For me it is the potential I see in Steemit to make a difference in people's lives and my abhorrence of scammers and free loaders.

@logic:

I don’t like injustice. It annoys me to see some scammer getting rewarded. Or greedy and inconsiderate whale that curates the scammers for a better and quicker buck.

@fubar-bdhr:

When I first started almost a year ago it was an easy way to make some extra steempower as a minnow. I looked for both good content for @curie and found a lot of abuse for @steemcleaners. Some days I would skim every post made. Over time those rewards gave me some decent steempower. Now i do it to protect my investment in steemit. If we allow the spammers and scammers to prevail steem will be worthless. Also I can’t stand scammers to begin with.

#NewsTeem: In your Discord Chat on 8/14 Patrice made a statement that there are over 1000 reported cases a week to Steamcleaners. "Not just linkdrops, but those we hunt down ourselves." That's a lot of work for a small group of people.

You have an excellent intro post from the very beginning, but for newer users, or those who like brief summaries, Can you give us a brief rundown of what Steemcleaners goals are, and more specifically, the process of hunting down and commenting/flagging content?

@patrice:

I think our goals have evolved as steemit.com has evolved over the last year. My personal priorities have always been plagiarism, identity theft/deception, and spam.

The process of hunting down content has changed for me as well over the last year. I started by just reading and curating. Today I have little time to do much reading or curating. Today I have a better ‘feel’ and can look for posts using predefined patterns. There are things that stick out like a sore thumb to me when looking at posts that tell me I need to look further. I’ve also started experimenting with database queries to find patterns.

@fubar-bdhr:

As I said above I started off both curating and looking for abuse as well. With the rise of steem price a few months ago so came the rise in the amount of abuse. I haven’t had time to curate anything since then. My first priority is hunting down scams and spam. It’s amazing how many people that spam and promote scams also plagiarize and copy/paste others works. When I’m done with my daily scam/spam hunt I focus on plagiarism. Plenty to go around unfortunately.

#NewsTeem: To quote the Intro post mentioned above.
"Steemcleaners are a group of Steemians concerned with the plague of plagiarism, copy paste, spam, scams, and other forms of abuse that keeps cropping up on our site."

Plagiarism and Copy/Paste seem pretty straightforward and easily proven. But spam and scams seem a bit more subjective. How do you determine what's a scam and what isn't? Obviously you have had people who genuinely believe in what they are posting about which steemcleaners flags as spam, leading to some back and forth about the validity of the flag. Do you have guidelines as to what you flag as scam/spam, and if so can you share them with us?

@patrice:

Spam & Scam are very difficult to tackle because of the subjectivity. Being a diverse group of individuals not all members of @steemcleaners agree on what does and doesn’t fall under our scope.

We do not currently have any hard guidelines on scam/spam. Since it has been a year we are currently rewriting the abuse guide to address the changes we’ve seen in the last year on the platform and define our scope of abuse fighting.

@logic:

I seldom comment and log such posts. If I do, I do not flag. I think that we should clearly define the scope of scam posts with clear definitions of what accounts to malicious referrals and which ones are harmless (as @guiltyparties nicely divided them in the post.)

@fubar-bdhr:

Scam and spam hunting can be a difficult task due to so many grey areas. As someone who looks for it everyday I have an advantage over the others. I’ve noticed many patterns and similarities in many of the scam/spam posts. If their post fits these patterns it’s usually an easy decision to comment and flag it. I also tend to look at both the post and account when making decisions. Is the post only meant to get referrals or is there actually good original content in it. Does the account have a history of other abuse?. Does the post contain more than one type of abuse?

^{(Image Credit: Surian Soosay on Flikr)}

#NewsTeem: So one of the things out there is that anyone can be rewarded for bringing content to your attention. It seems that there is a potential for abuse, or being called a "pay to play" type of system. How would you categorize your reward system, and how you keep it honest, so that people aren't wasting your time, or bringing a hundred posts to you hoping to hit on one?

@patrice:

So far we have not had any problems in this area. When it comes to users reporting abuse I usually get a good feel for the user. The limited number reporting makes it easy to know which ones are reliable and which ones are not.

Were we to run into someone trying to abuse the reward system we would take action and redesign the reward system.

#NewsTeem: Let's finish off by talking about the reason Steemcleaners has come to the forefront recently with the string of posts mentioned by @pandorasbox. On the surface, for people who don't know you, what you do, and did not look at her post that was flagged, she appears to have some relevant complaints. But digging down, obviously the post about NEO is 90+% copy/paste. She brought up eleven instances of what she proclaimed were Steemcleaners abuse. @logic came in and responded to each and every case quite clearly.

So for a moment, let's assume that @pandorasbox was right on all 11 instances, in the two weeks ending September 20th Steemcleaners had flagged 785 times. If you got 11 wrong out of 785, that would still be a pretty good record.

Report pulled from Steemreports.com 2017-09-19

@patrice:

Actually I think that would be a very poor record. While we are not perfect I’d like to think that all members of @steemcleaners take the time to do the proper research. That being said, I’m just as guilty of not being thorough somedays. The sheer amount of abuse being found and reported is daunting at times.

@fubar-bdhr:

From my observations on this there is just a certain type of person that will go into attack mode no matter what. Even a simple tag spam warning and they will make attack posts. Some live off the attention these attack posts bring and even make big payouts off of it. In the case of @pandorasbox even after getting answers from @logic he went and made another attack comment claiming he was ignored and not replied to. To me that shows he was just looking for a fight from the start. If you are wondering how many individuals out of the over 10000 people that have been logged react this way it’s a very low number. Probably under 25. That is under 0.2%

How do you respond to people who feel like the group has wronged them, and makeit their personal mission to come after Steemcleaners?

@patrice:

That is a tough one. As individuals we all respond differently.

The important thing I like to remind the community is that we are all individuals. We have different ideas, goals, and areas of abuse that are more harmful to the platform than others. As individuals we are free to downvote any content we disagree with using our personal accounts if we feel it doesn’t fall within the scope of @steemcleaners for downvoting.

We’ve had users attacking both the group as a whole and individual members. Personally I believe that ignoring the more outlandish claims works the best. It’s a waste of time to reason with the unreasonable. “Don’t feed the trolls.”

I personally don’t respond to a lot of accusations that are erroneous. When I come across what I believe are valid concerns I try to address them for the communities benefit.

When it comes to personal attacks I will always publicly support the member being attacked whether I agree with them a 100% or not. Well, unless my fellow @steemcleaner is just way out in left field somewhere. I think it is important that we stick together as a group to be effective.

@fubar-bdhr:

I’m sure I’ve had the most personal attacks. Everything from false accusations to attempted doxing and even a death threat in memo. While the threats are bad enough what hurts the most is people supporting and upvoting these attacks. While I do have a decent amount of steem power I am by no means a whale. I can hide some of the attacks but not when they get support from whales. You would think others invested in steemit would see upvoting these people as bad for the platform and currency.

#NewsTeem: And as a follow up to that, can you please talk about the appeals process and how someone who feels wronged can have their case heard and potentially reversed?

@patrice:

We will be publishing a post within the next week or two covering this in more detail.

#NewsTeem: What type of help do you need, and how can regular Steemizens help?

@patrice:

We are currently working to automate some of our more labor intensive tasks such as logging. I’ve posted a link to a google form for reporting in our linkdrop channels. While this is just a stepping stone to building a better mousetrap, it is an important one. It enables us to log your reports easier and faster.

As mentioned earlier there has been quite a bit of controversy and discussion of @steemcleaners in both posts and comments. This has made it impossible to ensure that we find all those trying to report abuse with mentions. We encourage everyone to use our new form. You can find it pinned in the linkdrop channels on both Steemit.chat & Discord.

If you have questions about what to report please ask! You can ask questions of @steemcleaners members in steemcleaners-public or ask me directly on discord in ask-patrice.

So there you have it from some of the biggest voices in the Steemcleaners organization. Another group doing their best to help the Steem community be as clean and fair as possible.

I was particularly struck when Patrice stated that 11 out of 785 flaggings being wrong would be an unacceptable percentage. It's impressive when a group is able to keep their false possitive level at under 2% and still considers that to be too many wrong calls.

The other striking part of this interview was Fubar's acknowledgement that tracking down scam/spam posts was now all they had time for, with no time left for curation. I, for one, don't know how I would manage a Steem existence composed solely of looking for abusive posts and no time to enjoy the experience.

Let's show the fine folks at Steemcleaners our appreciation. If you notice abuse of the Steem Rewards system you can report it at the Discord Channel Link Drop. They will check it out and follow up as needed. If you don't use Discord chat, you can also use this docs.google.com - Steem Cleaners Report Form

Our thanks to @patrice, @logic and @fubar-bdhr for taking time out of their busy schedules to talk to us about their mission and how they work every day for the betterment of Steem. We appreciate your time and effort!

Now it's your turn. Sound off in the comments below. What do you think can be done to take on those trying to abuse the system? What do the Steemcleaners mean to you and your time on Steemit? Come on in and join with us in a discussion on how to be a part of the solution!