Most would be familiar with how 
“#art” is one of the most often abused tags in the blockchain. There are countless art posts published on the blockchain since it launched that lumps into the abuse category. Any abuse fighters (people that care enough to do some negative curation) has seen their fair share of this type of abuse regularly if not daily.
The way Ntopaz handles abuse is a different case and will be explained below. It has its own sets of problems unique to its platform. A good example are cases where artists sharing their works that may not be their best efforts to date have yet to be tolerated long term. The platform welcomes artists willing to share their works and not necessarily be a professional at their craft. But it is expected that these artists post some reasonable quality content expected by the platform.
You don’t get that type of concern in other frontends of the blockchain where even low effort posts are tolerated unless they come across as spam n nature.
Summary of the Post:
Background of the types of abuse committed on the
The Coordinator Role
The Maintenance Work
Artisteem was the first name used by
Well, imagine the tag’s trending page littered with these posts. Some posts aren’t even art, to begin with. I later found out that multiple accounts were created to milk these autoupvotes. As I dived deep into the rabbit hole, I realized there was no manual curation happening at all. The only requirement to get an upvote having the “art” post published through their frontend.
I had some reports filed to steemcleaners. Some reports were processed, but most posts were just low quality pictures that these did not deserve the rewards compared to artists that actually took a lot of time to create their art works. I brought this up at 
The short version of the story was us having in contact with the owners, and a discord server was put up. This was the initial phase of keeping the platform organized.
To make it clear, it was unintentional for the voting system in place to support abuse as far as I know. Its goal was to make the tag valuable enough to convince people to use it often. This only proves that nothing should be left care free even in a decentralized system because of the shared reward pool we all earn from. Looking back at those days and how the platform is doing, I can say there are marked changes in the curation process, and well deserved authors get rewarded.
The Coordinator Role
Coordinators adhere to the current Policies used by the platform at the time of this writing. We enforce those guidelines within our scope.
So what if we found posts that didn’t comply with the guidelines?
Most of the time, it would be just orientation and reminding people about the guidelines. But if there is gross misconduct or abuse, one can go immediate to inactivation for seven days (no posting for seven days). It is a case to case basis.
1st offense are usually warnings given to users. Everyone can make some beginner mistakes when getting acquainted with the platform. To date, the only experience when we had to perma ban a user on their first offense was due to negative behavior towards the moderator’s intervention. It would have been a case easily pardonable, but that user kept posting low quality and insincere art works. They had to be gone.
The perma ban is only suited for the 4th offense. Getting inactivated from the platform isn’t a reason to stop posting and trying to build a reputation again. Curators don’t count mistake but look at your works as it is. If the artist prefers not to post after being inactivated temporarily, it’s their choice, but we keep the doors open. The only time when this option is not accessible is when the user is blacklisted, and most of the time they deserve it.
We deal with antiabuse internally we base our judgement on a user’s behavior and conduct within the platform. If these users committed plagiarism outside the platform, then ntopaz will not act on it, our scope is within what happens in our turf. We can deactivate the account temporarily and remove the vote as a means to enforce the rules.
Why does the platform not actively downvote users even if the offenses are proven? It’s not within the Ntopaz philosophy to punish artists. Yes, even artists that previously committed fraud can be pardoned as long as they do not repeat the same mistakes. We are not snipers waiting for people to do wrong nor do we tolerate abuse when it happens in our turf. We give plenty of chances for abusers to change for the better.
What if they don’t change? We keep the algorithm in dealing with abuse in place. They will not get an upvote, they will get inactivated, and will find out they are wasting their time bothering. On my part, I go ahead and file some reports to steemcleaners or steemflagrewards if I’m in the mood to go the extra mile.
Why the limited scope? Why not use that power to also go out there and support all artists in the blockchain? Or fight abuse outside the platform? We only have a limited amount of voting power to go around. The platform has been acquiring new names recently and a lot of promising artists too. We’d rather support the ones that add value to the platform.
The amount of SP Ntopaz has at the moment came from the pocket of the company owners. Not entirely dependent on external delegations unlike other well supported projects of STINC. Anyone can do whatever they want on the blockchain with their stake, and Ntopaz chose to build value on it’s platform with their stake.
The Maintenance Work
Routine surveillance and verifying are the usual tasks Coordinator’s do. Each week, a new set of names from the outside and inside the blockchain come and sometimes raises doubts when there is an existing art posted from another social media site. It can’t be helped to find occasional vote farming posts trying to game the voting system, but we do our best to solve whatever problems we encounter.
Given that the platform is built on the same blockchain, it would come as no surprise when we occasionally have
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