As a new Steemian I have learned a lot over the past 2 months in my short journey on this platform. I started out a little faster than others on this platform as I have a small group of people following me on YouTube from my channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/meetseanwalters1). This allowed me to hit the ground running where I was able to receive some upvotes from the very beginning without having to start from ground zero.
Upon doing this I also was able to get a Steem Whale to upvote my content in the very beginning so this helped a lot with motivating me to produced more and more content since a lot of it was based around videos that I made on YouTube.
Based on the success that I had with uploading my very own content I decided to try using some content that I had purchased from a vendor that I had used prior that I had never had any issues with. I wanted to see if I could really ramp up my content producing efforts and to see if I could leverage a little of someone's time instead of 100% my own.
I decided to upload 2 articles one on each day that you will see listed below. Mind you prior to me uploading these 2 articles I had run them through a duplicate content checker that I had used in the past, but for some reason on this occasion it must had not been able to detect the content that was already indexed somewhere else online as it pertained to these 2 articles.
https://steemit.com/video/@mrwalt/content-samurai-review-is-this-the-next-level-of-video-marketing
https://steemit.com/money/@mrwalt/webinarjam-studio-review-all-hype-or-the-ultimate-income-booster
With that being said each article was uploaded to Steemit and they were upvoted by the community as usual just like the rest of my content had been up to this point. However, after a few hours after I had uploaded the second article one of the Steemians that usually comments and upvotes my post had indicated to me that had been down voted.
I was downvoted by a Steem Whale and SteemCleaners left a comment on my 2 posts that I had uploaded which brought down my reputation and zeroed 100% of all of my rewards for those 2 posts. What also happened was that I was put on the blacklist (https://steemit.com/@blacklist-a) and given a cheetah ban (https://steemit.com/steemit/@cheetah/faq-about-cheetah). If you are a content creator on Steemit this is not something that you want to have happen to you as it will impact your ability to grow a following and earn and things will be unpleasant for you on Steemit.
So even though I did not copy content from the Internet, I still purchased content that was copied from somewhere on the Internet and I take 100% of the responsibility. Yes I did check to make sure that it was not duplicate content and did provide proof to the moderators that it was purchased and it was not something that was intentionally done, but the fact remains is that I still uploaded it to the platform.
Due to my part in this and as a way to persuade newcomers from not having to repeat this process or having to go through this experience and to make the community better I agreed to write this post and to accept no payout for it.
My advice and what you can take away from this post is if you are going to post on Steemit make sure that it is 100% of your own content if you want to be 100% sure that it doesn't get flagged for it being duplicate content. If you value your time and want to contribute on the platform and you see Steem as a long term thing just post your own content and you will have no issues.
Hopefully this post was informative and provided some value to the community.
Thank you for your time and reading if you made it this far,
Sean