I'd noticed this account several times and never really took a close look at it until @copypastewaster contacted me about it.
After a quick look at his page I decided it was time to do some digging.
Since joining in January this account has transferred out 6327.223 in SBD. It's account currently holds 2,179.523 SBD and 5,144.009 STEEM. His pending payout according to steem.supply is Liquid: 233 USD, Invested: 234 USD All earned from copying and pasting articles from ZeroHedge and a few other sites.
Does he participate in the community? Let's see some stats I pulled using SteemData and Studio 3T for MongoDB.
Posts: 208
Comments: 32
Up-votes: His own post and comments under his post
SteemData and MongoDB didn't help me make heads or tales of who he votes for so I headed over to steemd.com and used my browsers find function to see who he was voting for. I went through several pages and all I saw was votes for his own posts and commenters on his posts.
I'm a curious girl so I headed over to SteeMVP for some more stats:
zer0hedge's recent 52 posts
Garnered 3883 votes
From 1724 unique voters
Which resulted in $ 4345.98 payout value
You can also head over there yourself to find out who is top voters are.
I bet if Tyler Durden doesn't actually write the articles himself for ZeroHedge he does actually pay someone to do it for him. He doesn't just go out and pluck a story written by someone else from the internet copy, paste, and format for the site.
This is a serious slap in the face to those of us here who try to write original content whether it is someone who wants to be a professional writer or the average person like me who writes the odd post about I 💖 Bargain Shopping or posts pictures about trying to tame a house that has been neglected for years.
I wrote this post as an example to newbies on how to share a post and express their thoughts and opinions. When they stumble across a copy & paste post this well rewarded it's not hard to see why they jump to the conclusion that this is something the community values.
My thoughts are more along the lines of whether or not STEEM/SBD and the concept of Steemit will succeed if this continues to be rewarded. I usually focus more on finding plagiarism since I figure everyone who votes for sourced copy and paste articles are using their voting power the way they wish to. Seeing this though, just "gets my goat" as my dad would say.
Just another shout-out to all of you out there that support @steemcleaners and take the time to drop your finds in #steemcleaners-linkdrop, we appreciate you!
And now, I'm also starting to see copy and paste comments too.
Yeah, and it gets hard to tell what is human typed generic comments, C&P, and bot! Not that it really matters when it comes to volume. High Volume = SPAM
i don't think there is a high volume C&P comment bot yet but in theory it's possible. after all steemdata is quite up to date.
Copy paste comments where ?
haha like #whysocurious me.
Took me a while to find it. Thank goodness for steemdata. Have to resort to that.
Here's the link to the comment:
https://steemit.com/sunthursday/@ace108/once-upon-a-sun-ride-for-sunthursday-1-1-steem-given-out-1-1steem-by-ace108#@fadhila/re-ace108-once-upon-a-sun-ride-for-sunthursday-1-1-steem-given-out-1-1steem-by-ace108-20170714t041359348z
See if you can find the source of the copy.
Since this :
this :
and this :
Is not enough for "some" people to know that it might be a repost and not a Zerohedge.com official account I've decided to add this disclaimer:
"Disclaimer : This is not the real Tyler Durden! I read ZeroHedge every day to find the one or two best articles and reformat them for Steemit. I appreciate the upvotes but consider following the account and resteeming the articles that you think deserve attention instead. Thank you!"
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@zer0hedge/bitcoin-soars-as-much-feared-network-split-appears-to-be-avoided
Any other suggestion ?
BTW, I'm not really upvoting my own comments. I'm upvoting the other's comments to put the best one at the top.
And you upvoted your own comment in a article complaining that you only upvote your own stuff. LOL
Oh, well...
Maybe you wouldn't even have seen this reply if I had not raised it to the top. Isn't that the whole point of steem ?
BTW; Nobody answered anything yet.
There are only 5 comments on this post.
And, yes, the point of STEEMit is to make STEEM.
And, yes, there are some whales who upvote their own Articles to make money, but I believe they are providing original content. At least the ones I saw.
The expectation is for people to provide some sort of original content, instead of a direct copy and paste. And maybe upvoting other people's comments, instead of their own.
But, you can do what you wish, until the powers that be do some sort of corrective action. I found this thread because I was reading another thread about someone abusing the hashtags and just accidentally clicked on this.
This has to stop. We appreciate what you do @patrice
i really appreciate your work patrice. keep it up it is good for the wellness of whole steemit community.
Thanks for the support!
Not sure why he used those last two lines for his reason to justify what he does
I guess he figures that he deserves to be paid for his effort. Not really sure how much effort that is since I've never tried to do it. I sincerely doubt it takes as much effort as doing the actual research, thought, and writing the article.
Tyler Durden is multiple people I know one of them.
I wonder what they think about this.
Damn agree with your points. The fact is this posters dont realize that they are undermining the original author's work by copy pasting stuff instead of being creative and contributing in a healthy discussion.
I personally think that they know and just don't care. Neither to do the ones that continue to up-vote their posts after being made aware of it. If they were witnesses I supported I would remove my vote.
That's rough. That's cool they you caught that. I did not think that voting for your own post benefited you at all hmmm. Yet a newbie my vote has little power any ways. Thanks for sharing.
thanks for bringing that up,i thought ZH posts articles here....shame shame this copy paste thing.
will unfollow ZH here on steemit and read the real ZH again,as before...
im doing it right now....
cheers
Honestly, I'm starting to lose faith in Steemit. (Not that I am some old hand).
Trending is a non-stop parade of BookingTeam junk mail spam pulling thousands of rewards. Then you have reposters like this guy, while I'm spending hours on well thought out and researched posts that, aside from my own vote, make under $1.
For example, I got no traction whatsoever trying to expose this rewardpoolrape, and instead, you have the whole platform ranting like morons about stopping self-voting.
https://steemit.com/curation/@lexiconical/exposing-advertiser-circle-jerks-in-trending-reward-pool-rape-and-bookingteam-com
Hint: You cannot stop self-voting with: Delegation, new accounts, vote trading, sock puppets, instant free transfers. You are an idiot if you think you can stop self-voting without removing these functions.
I really have to take more time to read some of what is going on instead of just sifting through the abuse posts. I've had tunnel vision a bit since I've been back.
I seriously didn't realize that self up-voting posts for dolphins and minnows was was so controversial lately.
The only way to stop self voting is to remove comment, curation and post rewards.
Self voting isn't all bad. Like anything else it is how & why the person is self voting. Just like the occasional copy & paste isn't bad when it follows copyright laws IMO. It's when it becomes spam that it becomes a problem.
I self vote about once a day on average for @zoee with this account. I don't have the money to power the account up and I'd like to use the account as a counter flag bot or something in the future.
I self vote my comments made under @steemcleaners when they need to be visible with either or both @steemcleaners and @patrice.
@bookingteam.com is another one I haven't had time to investigate. Thanks for the link. Is this what steemit.com would look like as companies come online? They rarely comment and are at 100% SP, rarely comment, and cash out.
I think reallocating some of the reward pool towards vote dispersion would reduce self-voting, or perhaps limiting the number of rshares that can be awarded by a single account (in votes) per top level post (including all sub-comments). I'm sure these are unlikely to happen though.
You may find the tools we're developing here useful in your investigations too:
http://www.steemreports.com/
I think sometimes tweaking the system to reduce abuse isn't the answer. There can't be an automatic fix for every problem as some would like there to be. Sometimes those fixes just create new problems.
The best we can do is to expose what we see as detrimental to the platform and the value of STEEM/SBD and hope the community agrees and forms a "human" solution by not rewarding such content.
Great tools! I'll definitely use them.
Yes, I know what you mean. It's no good adding complexity to chase a constantly moving target.
I'm afraid that yes, BookingTeam.com could be exactly what the platform looks like. Any company willing to take the risk can reap the rewards of 10x 100% upvotes per day as capital gains. Their marketing "investment" in the platform would pay itself off in maybe a year? Then they would be large stakeholders, "playing with the houses' money", pushing their marketing schlock every single day in Trending. Like today:
https://steemit.com/business/@bookingteam.com/what-s-next-the-future-of-vacation-rental
Note: they used to post straight reposts of articles from Huffington Post, etc. Now they are posting less obviously-abusive content, but IMO it's still just junk-mail advertisements.
teşekkürler güzel yazı takip et beni lütfen
beautiful stuff