Check Before You Upvote!

Reading through Steemit posts has become one of my favorite pass times. I especially like the introduceyourself section because it is like a gateway where new Steemians enter and we can welcome them into this great community (sounds corny, I know). Alas, all is not well with our gateway into Steemit.

The Welcome Mat

Ah yes, welcoming those new Steemians into our Steemit Community. Greeting them, giving them tips to help them get their bearings in the social media capital of the world. Wishing them luck with their future endeavours. Is there anything better than just being nice to the new kids on the block?

The not so nice

Introduceyourself and gaming are probably my favorite sections and I visit them daily to see who is joining Steemit and what the latest is on the gaming front.
However I have been seeing a trend lately in the Introduceyourself section,

Perhaps it always was like this and I just hadn't noticed it until now.

I was browsing the Introduceyourself section, just looking for interesting new Steemians and saw a picture of a particular nice looking woman. Being a man, of course I checked the post (and by the looks of it so had a lot of other people before me). The woman had posted some nice pictures of herself modeling, but something was off.
A quick search on the Google image search engine revealed that this woman was actually a famous model.

Now I am not saying that it could not be possible for a model to join a cryptocurrency driven Social Media site, but the fact that she had not verified herself and that the pictures she posted were readily available on the internet made me question the fact that she really was the person behind the post.

From that moment on I became quite suspicious of all posts containing attractive looking women introducing themselves as new Steemians. And sure enough a lot of the pictures of these "new" Steemians turn out to be copy-pasted from the internet.

Check out this new Steemian, beautiful isn't she? Now do a google search of that picture and you will find that the picture belongs to a model, Kimberly Blanco.

Even more Copycats

Another time I was reading a rather interesting Bitcoin article about traders from LocalBitcoins in Belgium who were arrested by the police. The article was well written, so I was inclined to give the post an upvote, but then I noticed a comment from our old friend "cheetah" who had found a "similar" article. "Similar" being an understatement because the post and article were exactly the same, down to the pictures.

The poster had added the source (which was good) but why would I upvote something that had not been written by the person who posted it? Was the poster expecting a finder's fee for the article, or trying trick people into thinking that he had written the article? My feeling is that it was the latter.

Looking for attention

If you scroll down the posts in the Introduceyourself section you will see that most posts aren't even about people introducing themselves. The section is being used as a kind of promotion channel to get upvotes. These posts are cluttering up the channel and making it harder for new Steemians to get noticed.

The Takeaway

Check before you upvote
People who are not holding up a card or something else that says Steemit are a red flag. Also look for links to social media sites that prove that the person is who they claim to be.
Google is your friend
Reverse search images on Google. Go to "Google images" and click on the little camera in the search bar. Copy-Paste the link of the image you want to lookup so you can verify who the person in the photo is.
The same goes for text, If you have your suspicions about the originality of a post, just copy-paste a part of the text into the Google search engine to see if you get any results.
Bots are also your friends
There are quite of bots busy with identifying plagiarism, just be sure to look for comments by bots like Hive account@cheetah before you upvote a post.
Don't reward people who are posting in the introduceyourself section but are not introducing themselves.

I am not so naive that we can completely stop people from abusing the system but I do hope that the spam will decline as soon as it becomes clear that copy-pasta and deception will not be rewarded.