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It's a blockchain, they cannot shut it down if they tried. I don't like where this is going. I've seen in the past month censorship, witnesses accused of corruption, myself accused of "draining the reward pool", and so on. Sure there are always problems but we need a better way of handling disputes rather than to air people out in public. At the same time people can see the trend, how the Steemians are fighting over the shrinking reward pool, how they are fighting over money, accusing each other of corruption, and indirectly linking it to Ned?

It's a case by case basis. Sometimes people simply forget to cite sources, other times they copy and paste entire articles without even trying to cite sources. So you have to look at if the blogger ever cited sources in the past and just forgot this time? That could be a legit accident but if they never cited sources then that probably is no accident.

"Bad" users? No. A blogger isn't a user, a blogger is a content generator. If a blogger does not generate original content which is of value then the blogger is not an effective content generator. This does not make the blogger a "bad user" whatever that even means. Nor does it give the people doing the upvotes the right in my opinion to judge any blogger personally on the level of being a "bad user", they might just be a bad writer. They can support the community in other ways besides being a writer, and even very good writers have bad days.

Do I think we should reward plagiarism? Hell no. We need quality content, and we need the content to follow the standards. This is why I never once plagiarized. Next time if you do see someone has plagiarized the right thing to do is to comment on their blog, tell them you caught them, offer them some advice on how to format their future posts, and see if they listen.

Bottom line, I think this is all the result of the fact that Steemit is just an experiment. The experiment to see how people will react when they can see how much others are earning. Of course any time when this is the case it's going to promote jealousy, and who is going to want to post if they see the top bloggers are being attacked for earning too much money, or being corrupt, etc? It's a matter of Steemit has to remain fun (despite the bots, the plagiarists, the controversial bloggers). When it stops being fun, people will stop posting, because no one is getting rich posting on Steemit right now.

You made very good points.

It's a blockchain, they cannot shut it down if they tried. I don't like where this is going. I've seen in the past month censorship, witnesses accused of corruption, myself accused of "draining the reward pool", and so on.

It is not a blockchain. It is the frontend to the blockchain and subject to US regulations.

Steemit.com is just a website. It is hosted on a server(s), and can totally be shut down. Steem is a cryptocurrency that is produced on a blockchain. The blockchain is decentralized, and while the POS VP weighting scheme leaves the Steem blockchain vulnerable to Sybil attacks that are extremely easy, if expensive, the blockchain is relatively immune to being shut down.

Steemit, Steem, and the blockchain, are different things.