Typically members see the hivewatcher (formerly "cheetah") ban as the malicious destruction of their profile. They may have gotten a few @hivewatcher comments in the past and/or a few @hivewatchers comments, maybe a downovte here or there. Maybe they ignored them, maybe they replied with a few choice words. All in all, the issue was not corrected and the member was repeatedly found to be plagiarising, copy/pasting full texts without anything original, not citing sources, or pretending to be someone else. And now, suddenly, they are @hivewatcher banned and the bot announces their misdeeds to the world.
Not a Bad Thing
Receiving a ban from @hivewatcher or the often-unwelcome attention of the @hivewatchers team is not necessarily a bad thing. Accounts that fall within this category are not getting the rewards they could potentially deserve by going against what the general community desires to see, which is ‘original content’. When you plagiarise, copy/paste, comment farm or do anything else that constitutes abuse, you are only harming your own account. You are sabotaging yourself and your potential.
If no one provides feedback for our work past the standard “nice post”, we as bloggers have no idea if we’re on the right track. Feedback is good. It keeps us grounded, it keeps us inspired, and it keeps us on the path to improvement. This is exactly what the @hivewatchers team aims to achieve; to provide members with feedback geared towards halting abusive ways to utilize the HIVE blockchain and encouraging them to reassess their blogs and activities.
So You Got Banned
If you see this comment on your blog posts, you’ve made it onto the blacklist. It’s annoying. Everyone knows your content is not to be trusted now. You look at the comment and then you follow its instructions and log into Discord chat to appeal it.
Before you start proclaiming your innocence, typically because you did not know better, you should take a moment and reflect on why this happened in the first place. Did you repeatedly copy/paste other users’ posts and claim that they were your own? Did you take other users’ photographs and edit them to add yourself into the scenery? Did you use Google Translate to plagiarise books written in Urdu and then claim that you wrote them? Did you really think that this was the right, moral and correct thing to do in order to get rewards from the HIVE ecosystem? I think we all know the answer to this question.
How to Appeal
The first part of appealing a ban should consist of a post on your behalf containing the following:
(1) Make an Apology Post
- The title must be: MY HIVEWATCHERS BLACKLIST. MY APOLOGY TO THE HIVE COMMUNITY.
- Include links to all abusive posts made by you.
- You must honestly write what you did wrong and why it was wrong without excuses.
- Finally you must apologise to the community.
(2) Post Original Content
- You will be asked to create and post original content certain amount of times for certain amount of days. The amount of posts/days to publish is being reflected by the type and intensity of abuse, user's blog reputation, community reputation, and the time spent actively on Steemit and HIVE.
(3) Finally
- Come back once finished and ask for a review in the "appeals" channel on Discord. If your appeal is successful, your blacklist will be removed
Please share your appeal on Discord after posting or jump on the chat prior to writing to receive clarification.
The purpose of this is for you to showcase that you understand that what you did was wrong and to address the community in its entirety. If you don’t understand, don’t worry. The goal of @hivewatchers is to educate and assist. Someone will go through your posts with you and ensure that you are fully versed as to why your ban occurred and what took place.
Following your post, you should resume using your account in a responsible and abuse-free manner. Cite your sources properly. Write original posts. Use your own photographs rather than someone else's. You know, be the kind of member others would want to Follow.
Do this for a week or so. After a week, jump back on the chat and show us your profile. We'll be more than happy to remove the ban and get that pesky @hivewatcher away from your posts.
Zero Tolerance Cases
Identity theft is a zero tolerance situation. Profiles purposefully designed and registered to steal another person’s identity and work will not receive any sympathy from ourselves or from anyone else on the HIVE blockchain. No one steals the identity of another person “by accident”. Pretending to be a talented photographer, for example, and then creating a profile using his name, biography and samples of work isn’t accidental. Aside from receiving unjust rewards, this also severely victimises and harms the individual being impersonated.
Identity deception is a closely-related offence. Identity deception takes place when a person creates a false identity using the information, work or photographs of a real individual. For example, that can entail finding a picture of a person on Facebook and claiming that person is really the member.
Both identity theft and identity deception are severely frowned upon by the community and may have severe legal repercussions on the offender. They are serious matters that will be treated with zero tolerance. Additionally, users who have been granted an appeal in the past but have gone back to committing the same abuses again are very unlikely to receive further consideration.
But I'm a Real Person!
If your profile has been inferred to be a case of identity theft or identity deception but it is actually you and your own work, you will be asked to verify this as being the case. Verifying can be done by:
- Posting a link to your HIVE profile from an established social media account
- Mentioning your Steemit profile in a video posted on your established YouTube account
- Linking to your Steemit profile from your official website
If you are really who you say you are these should be simple tasks that are relatively easy and only take a moment. However, if you are an impersonator, they are a monumental obstacle.
Improving Your Blog
Remember how earlier we said you should resume using your account in a responsible and abuse-free manner? "Easier said than done!" you may think. "If I stop what I'm doing, I won't get rewards!"
That is incorrect. Here are a few simple ways to revamp your account in a profitable manner that showcases you as a creator of quality original content:
- Instead of copy/pasting full articles -- Use a few quotes from the original article, link to the source, and add your opinion about the article
- Instead of plagiarising random Wikipedia pages -- Write a post about something you actually know about or are interested in (ie. if you studied accounting in school, write about accounting)
- Instead of looking for a picture on Google Images for your monomad challenge -- Grab your cellphone and go outside to take a picture
- Instead of posting random one word comments and upvoting them -- Look for posts you're interested in and write thoughtful comments other people would want to upvote
- Instead of using Google Translate to plagiarise recipes from the internet -- Take a picture of your breakfast and lunch and write a few sentences about it
- Instead of using popular tags that have nothing to do with your post -- Use relevant tags that describe your content and help others find it
There are many ways to create original content others would want to read and value. Optimizing your blog for quality will help you earn better rewards and keep @hivewatcher away.
More information can be found in the Abuse Guide - 2017.
Do you have specific topics that you'd like @hivewatchers to address and clarify in our future posts? Let us know in the comments.
thans for post
@upvotelife
Very insightful and, most importantly, well meaning post about some possible grey areas.
As someone who wants to build an account dedicated to sharing music by promoting lesser known artists and hence using their content, it can be a rather grey area, that I am trying to navigate in the most productive and ethical to everyone involved way.
The dilemma is pretty clear - I believe in the benefit of what I do for development of good electronic music and providing talented artists with whatever amount of exposure and support I can. But it is also not my original content, one can argue, even though it takes a lot of work and dedication on my end to source this music pool.
I believe in and trust steemit community to find reasonable ways with approaching content attribution and I am glad to have these issues addressed in an open and, actually, given the subject matter, quite polite and understanding ways.
Wishing everyone more inspiration for their content, a tighter and more quality filled community and from a personal takeaway point never stopping to work on quality of your work and delivering the best you can.
There is a couple of ways to look at this I think. If you are sharing music by other artists and have their permission to earn rewards for that and it can be verified (link on their YouTube channel) then I don't see a problem. Just make that clear in your posts.
If you don't have their permission it gets a bit murky. It can be argued that you deserve a reward for your time and effort curating. There are tools built into the block chain but not available on the UI such as defining a maximum accepted payout (
max_accepted_payout) for a post.Using the UI, if you are engaging the community with comments you could encourage upvotes on your comments. That may or may not reward you for your time spent promoting the artists.
Couldn't agree more. From one point of view, I provide them exposure (and that is only if and more hopefully when my posts generate viewership), I also do a mini-review of each track, which is an original content of mine. From the other point of view of generating rewards for it, it doesn't seem fair content split wise for me to get all the rewards for it. And from a third point of view, I spend time building community around the @deeptechhouse blog and extra sets of ears on these artists' content are due to effort put into growing the account.
What I do for my DJ series already is reach out to all artists I feature tracks of, so I was thinking I should start doing the same for the tracks I feature as track of the day on Steemit. That way I provide a link back to Steemit community by promoting it and also split any rewards generated on the post itself with an artist whose music I promote. At the heart of it I want to promote the artists and build the community and I am MORE than happy to share the rewards, and perhaps bring new users to the Steemit platform encouraged by a possibility of a reward from me featuring their track (or DJ set).
I really appreciate you replying to my comment and I am glad you confirm my moral uneasiness about it even though my intentions come from a good place.
@cheetah made a comment on one of post about seeing it on another site, that made me improve my writing skills.
People are lazy and they tend to copy everything they come across without input anything original, it's a really bad practise I urge u guys to continue the good work.
Thank you! @cheetah does a wonderful job there but most members of the community don't look at it that way.
Excellent, like a scarlet letter for plagiarists, I am new, what about comments on other people's posts, can I use memes from an image search or do I have to make my own?
Memes have been somewhat controversial.
My opinion is that if you are using them in comments they are fine. Be sure they are relevant and don't over use them. Someone might think they are spam.
It's even fine to use them in posts. When you use them in posts I'd like to see something that indicates that it isn't your meme though. "Hey I found this great meme" works.
It's not that sharing things like memes and YouTube videos is bad. It's really about how they are shared since the person is being paid for sharing something created by someone else.
what about tweets, is there a preferred way to share them? I like to comment on people's tweets sometimes.
I'd probably say use a screenshot with a link to the original tweet then add your reply under it. The important part is adding something original to it. Not just grabbing something, pasting it, and hitting the post button.
Creo que mientras se haga con conciencia y no arbitrariamente es una buena acción paralizar a los plagiadores. Tolerancia cero.
good idea for making STEEMIT better)!
I am new blog writter so now i am try to improving my blog,that why it is very good tips for me.
Thank you
I think this is very good advice.
gracias por su consejos amigos, mucho exito y saludos desde Venezuela:)
zahidzzs (46) in steemitabuse-appeals • 33 minutes ago
photo in my post was my original work. But i think same photo has been used by my friends account. As we had one camera and shared our photos in our harddrives. And due to this may be cheetah got triggered.
If this is the case kindly remove me from blacklist it wont happen again.
Accept my apology.
I have edited the post and removed the photo.
https://steemit.com/photography/@zahidzzs/it-says-something
Could you please paste this photo in response to my comment here?
I would like to have a look at it. Thank you
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Keep up the good work! Great information for all to read!
However, I see you have used the #copyright tag, but there is no mention of copyright. you are only talking about plagiarism and identity theft. Is that not an incorrect usage of a tag? LOL!
I was searching for other posts about copyright, but they are very sparse on here! Infringing on copyright is illegal, whereas plagiarism is not. There needs to be a some serious education about this on Steemit!
Also, elsewhere on the web, professional blogs and articles always show a credit line for images. I find it quite disappointing that credit lines are only required by Steemcleaners along with photography tags. I'd love to see that changed. Blogs with images and no credit lines look amateurish, and anyone searching from the web could tell immediately that the images are likely swiped!
You are correct, the #copyright tag should not be here. The post will be edited to correct that. It's my mistake and I own up to it.
Adding more posts about copyright is a good idea. We're definitely going to explore that in future posts.
Great point about the credit line. It's not so much that these are only required along with the photography tag but that posts that have the photography tag very often are full of copy/pasted images unfortunately.
LOL!
There are plenty of copy/pasted images on blogs that don't have the photography tag, but when I report those I am told that it is not abuse because the photography tag is not there. I don't agree with that reasoning. I have written quite a few posts about copyright (my latest was today) because I feel that the Steemit community on the whole is very naive when it comes to image rights and usage. As a professional photographer who is losing income because royalty fees are not being paid, I'd like to see that change!
Intellectual property is a baseless and ridiculous concept.
I have as much right to make a living from my photography as you do from whatever your employment is.
The fact that we are given the responsibility to "make a living" in a society that is entirely owned and controlled by private property owners is precisely the problem. institutions like intellectual property reinforce the delusion.
UM, everybody controls their own private property. My house is mine and not available for sharing with you - likewise my images! They are available for licensing - just like you would rent a hotel room or a car. That's my living. Sorry if you don't agree that I have a right to it, but each to his own. We live in an entitlement society and that's just it. Others feel entitled to reap the rewards from MY hard work. Neither the electrician nor the plumber will work for me for free, so I don't work for free either.
I will definitely direct offenders to this post https://steemit.com/steemcleaners/@steemcleaners/appealing-the-blacklist. Thank you so much for your hard work in cleaning steemit of all the cut and paste stuff we can find elsewhere. Big upvote from me to encourage you to keep posting the sake helpful messages.
You guys are kind of obnoxious, if you claim to speek for what the community as a whole demands than shouldn't the voting system suffice.
leaving i dk wht happening i went to 45 lvl then 40 then 18 then 31 then 12 now i do post i post source i post my own post also dan resteem my post problem started from there whales downvoted targetd me and now this @steemcleaners downvoting my all post everypost and supporting that post withhigh power account this is shit man u guys want every single money of steem :D go on then i am leaving be happy goodbye :D check my historyguys for wht this shit @steemcleaners is doing
That's good information.
I'll keep you safe.
I guess I need to get work immediately!
I've written my apology post. I wanted to share it on https://steemit.chat/channel/steemitabuse-appeals
as advised but I don't know how. I tried clicking on the link but it refused to work. Can I go ahead with the 7 posts and 7 days of cleansing?