Yes the Steem police are out there, they have a lot of Steem power and aren't afraid to use it on you noobs they feel aren't worthy of their Steem investment and will downvote your post.
The Steem police I am referring to are the one's with some Steem power and feel that now it's their trusted duty to tell you how to operate on this still fairly new site. I myself am totally fine with constructive criticism please by all means give it to me!.....
But do we really need other Steemians policing this site just because you may have more influence than others?
Well to some degree yes, look I get it you don't like plagiarism and you care about integrity and honesty and I commend your feelings on that as you should. But why waste your time and energy telling someone else what to do? Let Steemit handle that! Honestly I could care less if you want to tout yourself as pewdie pie or president Obama, if it's funny and made me laugh or intrigued me, hey thanks for saving me trip to find it. Nobody really cares about Michael Jackson or Metallica or whoever having people write music for them and then they perform it right, all you care about is damn that's a really good track. You aren't going to not buy those artist music because they didn't write it. What about the people on the corner singing Janis Joplin music? Are you policing their tip jar and saying hey don't tip this chick, she isn't the real Janis Joplin. Look this is a new platform and it's taking people who have never blogged before or have written pieces on the internet and may not know that hey you should site someone's work.
Eventually those users who falsely claim work as their own will eventually have to deal with actual copyright claims from that third party when it comes time to. Article 20. in the terms and services which I actually read, Steemit is capable of handling that in their own way so let them handle it. I feel it's better to just be concerned with the content they post, if you want to police that by all means tell someone that their content isn't very good and give a detailed reason why. But pointing your Steem powered gun and pulling that trigger when it's not necessary in some cases can do more harm than good.
Here are the terms and services if you are interested https://steemit.com/tos.html
Oh if anyone cares I took that gif from giphy.com they are a great service. I'm gonna site myself for this independent thought I had to create this post.
by bjones