As Steemit grows we are seeing more abuse of the system. It's inevitable that people will try to make more than they really deserve. Steemit is supposed to be about rewarding the best content, but we can see a lot of pointless content making more than some people do from their hard work. This can sometimes be one word comments that have nothing to do with the post or posts that plagiarise others.
CC image from Flickr
I don't know if this idea has already been implemented already, but I'll lay it out here anyway. There are a number of accounts such as @cheetah and @sherlockholmes that look for posts and accounts the violate the rules and/or spirit of Steemit. They publish lists of the offenders. Cheetah will leave comments to give some indication that a post is plagiarising so that people can choose whether to vote, but that may get buried by other comments. Some of these comments mention that people are on a blacklist that I assume is for the worst cases. Is this list public?
What I propose is some way to know if a post you are seeing is by a known offender. That could be via a browser extension that consults public blacklists. Those lists ought to be on the Steemit blockchain so that we can verify the source. Perhaps they could be on posts with a specific tag and conform to some format that can be automatically read. I'm thinking that the extension would allow you to choose which sources you trust to audit users. It may be that some will specialise in certain languages or other sorts of community.
Although I am a software developer this sort of thing is outside my area of expertise, but I'm sure there are others here who could do this. It will require some cooperation between developers and those who compile the lists.
Of course mistakes will be made and there should be ways to appeal against getting blacklisted. I've seen people do this on the abuse chat channel, but with some of them they must have known what they were doing was wrong. You should not expect to get paid for copying the work of others.
I don't know if they do it already, but the pay-for-vote services such as @booster, @randowhale, @minnowbooster should also be consulting blacklists so that they do not encourage bad behaviour. Is that likely?
I want Steemit to be a welcoming environment that really does reward good content and behaviour.
Steem on!
I'll buy guitar picks for Steem Dollars
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