[Photo by Mathias Appel, public domain]
Since some back-up witnesses (witnesses beyond the top 19) have started doing updates, and I know a lot of people are interested in @cheetah stuff, I figured I'd do one this week. So here's what I have been up to.
Fighting Plagiarism, ID Theft, and Scams
This is the main thing I do, all day every day, to keep steemit as clean as I can.
I wasn't thinking about doing this update this week, until about yesterday, so I don't have complete statistics on how many cases of each I have caught. Next week I will keep a log, 'cause numbers! Plagiarism is in the hundreds, ID theft and Scams are in the dozens, and a couple cases of sock-puppet cartels. The cheetah section will have some numbers.
This fight is, thankfully, not alone. There is a small group of other abuse-fighting vigilantees, in the steemitabuse-classic channel in steemit.chat. Without this group of members, you would be shocked at how much garbage would be appearing if we didn't kill it before it gets traction.
Cheetah Bot!
I have done several upgrades to Cheetah bot this week, all under the hood. You will notice there are a lot fewer mistags this week than last week, without sacrificing the catching ability.
One of the coolest things that is in progress, with the awesome work of @originate is a website to watch cheetah and the detection, which will hopefully consolidate efforts of manual abuse fighters. My post today is not an official announcement of the site, but if you want to preview / beta test feel free to join us in steemitabuse-classic and I can give you the link.
A second cool thing is also in progress. Some people know... but I don't want to give too much away on this yet. :)
Some interesting statistics on Cheetah bot this week:
- Cheetah made 772 new comments this week.
- Cheetah is now the #2 commenter on steemit, with 4,022 comments.
- Cheetah made about $1 in comment rewards this week.
In regards to the comment rewards, I realized this week that the reward pool does not pay out unless the reward is greater than 2 cents. First, this sucks for minnows. Second, this sucks for cheetah, as was not able to "pay myself" anything for cheetah comments, and the reward cheetah gets from comments is a spit in the bucket compared to the cost of running the algorithm. Too bad.
Funding for Abuse Fighters
I have been thinking the past few days for strategies to incentive abuse fighting. The issue is that people who do, use their Vote power, to hunt abuse are very rarely rewarded right now -- in fact, they are usually flagged in retaliation, so not only is there an opportunity cost (no curation reward), there is a TRUE reward cost for flagging abusers. I had a few thoughts on how to solve this:
- Top 19 witnesses make >1000 steem power daily.
All we would need is one of the top 19 witnesses to attribute their funds to a pool of rewards to give out to abuse fighters, and they would be rewarded quite nicely. (If I were a top 19 witness, this is what I would do with my funding.) - Fundraising drives for abuse hunters.
This could be done either by post reward or donation, and a respected member of the community could hand out the money based on participation of abuse fighting. A clear incentive (bounty) to hunt abuse would make people much less afraid of retaliation on their posts.
So that's about it. Since I don't have a formal solution for funding abuse fighters yet, the best I can do today, is the following:
I'm going to war on spam. @anyx is like a tank, in a field of ants. Steemit needs @anyx.
@sergei who just downvoted me. Don't you realise, you're just exposing yourself to everyone? Now, even more people are going to scrutinise your spammy content.
Plus, I am just following his downvotes of your content with upvotes... So his downvotes are getting you paid lol
Upvoted and maybe more users need to be aware that:
Fighting plagiarism requires the cost of server resources and paid subscriptions to search engines to be able to query content! Not only this, but the expertise and effort of creating the bot in the first place has value!
If you value people fighting spam and especially plagiarism, UPVOTE them to keep them alive! My own personal bot ( @clamps) has been downgraded to limited capacity due to this! If users don't support the effort, there is no incentive to carry on fighting spammers and theives.
Give em the clamps!
Are cases of stalking part of the steemitabuse classic?
I was explaining your cheetah bot to my parents the other day and I realized that you and cheetah have made such a big difference to Steemit. I saw the @steemcleaners group and I am so impressed with that initiative. I sent over a contribution to show my support of your endeavors. Thank you! Thanks to Cheetah too!
Huge respect for all your efforts. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who works hard to create original content for Steemit should support @anyx and @cheetah as much as possible.
Thank you! It is a team effort -- your efforts included! Hence my pledge. :)
I try to upvote Cheetah everytime I see a comment, sadly most don't. I know there are running costs per comment (which adds up) so hopefully others can atleast help you break even. If it wasn't for Cheetah, manually detecting abuse would be an even more cubersome task.
You rock @anyx ! and thanks for helping the platform evovle
All pledged reward (came out to $233.407) was just sent out. If I missed anyone active this last week, PLEASE pm me and I will send you $5 out of my pocket.
Thanks everyone!
Wow, thank you! That was an unexpected gift. I wasn't aware of the $0.02 payout limit. That is unfortunate. I hope Cheetah gets some more love in the comments. I'm thinking through a post I have in mind regarding the role of protecting identities, original content creators, and the like within a voluntary community. Lots to think through. My hunch is many anarcho-capitalists who love property rights but don't support IP haven't thought through what this place would look like without Cheetah bot and the efforts of many users working to keep things cleaned up.
Thanks so much! Appreciate you and Cheetah and all you do for this platform!
You and the rest of the steemitabuse-classic folks are doing a fantastic job on keeping this platform clean. I know it's probably a pretty thankless job, but please know that plenty of people -me included -really value what you're doing.
It's a shame about @cheetah not paying for itself very well. Wouls you accept donations in Steem Dollars towards the bot's upkeep? I know I'd love to support the effort beyond just looking out for hinky posts, and I'm sure others would, too.
The run cost was first bootstrapped by @pharesim, an awesome top witness who also encouraged me on the development. :)
Now that the project is going though, I feel like we already have a way to fund these kind of projects -- the reward pool. It's what it's there for! I don't think the community should have to spend their own earned money on this, when steemit has a way to reward effort already. I've been nicely rewarded for my past posts (but is that to reward me on the development, or pay for costs? Do I "deserve" a reward for creating it too? Well, deserve is subjective.), but we can figure something out for the long term, similar to how I want to figure out how to reward human abuse hunters as I mention in my post.
Its great that you dedicate your time, talent and creativity to maintain the credibility and authenticity of this wonderful platform. You are doing a commendable job with your work on Cheetah my friend. I would like to assist you in anyway possible to make the community a better, more equal place for every one who is willing to make a positive contribution to the growth of the platform..
Thanks. Cheetah is one of the few bots I actually like. Also good idea with with the reward fund.
You should be duly compensated for your efforts in making Steemit a quality-content site.
Hi @anyx, sorry for kind of off-top, but I need your help with PLAGIARISM.
Here is an article promoted by @gavvet, but it unfortunately is just translation of a Russian article written in 2013. I believe original is here, at least it's just the same as it's English version here. There is also given Latvian version of the article which is just google translate for sure - I live in Latvia and Latvian is my second "native language", the first one is Russian.
As you fight with plagiarism I assumed you may want to take some action on this case - unfortunately I am not able to affect things due to reputation of 51. I also am not sure if it is appropriate to downvote such an article as I believe that @gavvet was unaware of the situation... What would be the solution?
Thank you in advance!
https://steemit.chat/channel/steemitabuse-classic
Yep, anyone is free to come in this channel if you think you find anything or want to help! We are discussing the above case. :)
I learn something new every day. I didn't know the comments don't pay out unless it gets to .02 cents.
I suppose the interactions and feedback I get is reward enough tho :)
Just curious... how does the Cheetah bot distinguish between content that has some copied text and a post that is entirely copied?
If you're just including a couple small
from something, you should be fine. Do cite the source, though.
Go Cheetah, We love you! )))
I admire your concern to the platform @anyx. I couldn't share much of the technicalities of steemit because I don't knowledge about it but I do understand your point. Keep up the good work sir.
Proud to be part of this :) Got my beret on
Thank you for your work and bounty to abuse fighters, We do it together for free because it's necessary, but bonys it's still nice =)
We continue our fight
Thanks @anyx - One thought on the reward pool for abuse hunters. It's sad that we have to think this way, but if there was a reward for catching abuse, you might see cases where people start fake accounts and do abusive things, then 'catch' themselves with their real account.
Hmmm... Ugh!
Yeah, I am thinking about this for sure as I move forward with the rewarding initiative..
This really sucks for the amount of work and contribution cheetah is doing! SUPPORT U ALWAYS!
Good job @anyx. I have been looking at your work since you joined (way before I created my account). @cheetah is a really nice tool. There should be a better way to award 'cleaning team' than just an upvote. Maybe someone will add a tip button to rc1 of Steemit ;) Meanwhile, from now on I will upvote all your posts related to 'cheetah' till the whole thing stops or Steemit die in the garbage flood.
Thanks @anyx for the anti-abuse donation!