Just in how many was can Steemit be abused? Both new and old users seem to be really committed to show us as many creative (and not so creative) answers to that question.
One strategy that seems to be in vogue lately is impersonating an already popular and well-established content creator, be it an individual, a company or a brand.
Exhibit A.
Exhibit B.
I have a suspicion that such impostor pages are run by the same person or the same group of people, since they all follow the same modus operandi: They fill their header with the general info about the website and information offered, and then proceed to upload articles or videos one after the other without any further ado. All while indiscriminately following about 50,000 users in hopes of growing a following of their own.
Another one...
Pro Tip: If you are planning on impersonating a well-established content creator or brand, don’t be lazy and at least take the bother to make it a bit more believable by making some sort of introduction post.
Apparently these impersonators are in so much of a hurry to get some easy money (OMG!/iamverysmart) to realize the implausibility of one of this big players making their debut in a new, ground breaking platform like Steemit by unceremoniously posting a stream of random articles without any attempt at explaining why they are posting here in the first place.
Moreover, if they were genuinely adopting Steemit as part of their media platforms they would surely make an announcement of sorts in their official page/twitter/FB page, etc.
And even more examples... take into account that these are only the ones I detected in my recent following.
Beyond just ranting and complaining about it, I am interested in knowing what we can do about it. Since most of this accounts are new, their posts can be flagged to oblivion without any fear of a disastrous retaliation from their part. This is what I have been doing so far. I also wish there was a way to remove them from my followers so I don’t accumulate rubbish in my follower count.
However, is there a way to report these accounts as clear cases of abuse so they are removed? My opinion is that in cases like this there should be zero tolerance. What they are doing is not a newbie honest mistake, but an obviously intentional attempt to capitalize on stolen (and probably copyrighted) material. I don’t think Steemit needs to become littered with a flurry of inactive/flagged accounts, created for the sole purpose of plagiarism.
Maybe you might be tempted to think that they are generally making very small profits and therefore it is not an important problem to be dealt with; however, little things add up eventually. If we add this problem on top of all the other cases of micro and macro abuse of the platform, we are surely well on our way to making things really hard for creating a quality, ground breaking community with excellent content like Steemit has the potential to be.
Let's work towards improvement, meanwhile, how can we deal with these issues plaguing our dear internet oasis?
Feel free to state your opinion in the comments!
Cheers,
Irime