Updating The System - New Strategy To Fight Against Plagiarism

^{Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay}

Greeting Everyone!

Welcome to Mosquito Squisher,

Due to various reasons we are undergoing some changes and bringing new techniques to fight against Plagiarism on the platform. Mosquito Squishers was started almost 4 months ago by @endingplagiarism (with help from @the-gorilla) to highlight plagiarism and spam content. During this 4 month period, the awareness of the challenges Steemit faces has increased significantly and the team is being made aware of an increasing number of cases every day - We have been notifying plagiarists and community leaders by putting a warning as a comment in the plagiarised content.

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Updates:

1 - Moving Into the Shadows

Having started the most recent initiative and working hard to bring it this far, @endingplagiarism has decided to take a step back from the day-to-day activities and focus her efforts behind the scenes on the more complex cases.

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2 - More Onus on Community Leaders
In @steemitblog's recent guidance for communities, they stated:

The number one rule for every community should be a clear and robust policy about the nonacceptance of plagiarism. This should be backed up by consistent and thorough checking by Admins and Moderators.

Our expectation of this is that community leaders not only mute plagiarised content but also remove the upvotes that have been received where possible. We have encountered too many instances of posts that have been upvoted by community accounts, community admins, and moderators that have not removed these upvotes. If community leaders do this, it is a clear indicator to the Steemit Team that you are doing all that you can to support the fight against plagiarism.

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3 - The Four Stages Process

At the start, we decided to create a 4 stage process to warn the plagiarist. This has worked well but due to the shortage of time (it is a tough job), a single message will be delivered on each plagiarised content and we will keep track of the stages each plagiarist is at in our back-end. Once a user reaches Stage 3, we will identify them as a well-known plagiarist in our weekly list of plagiarists. This also relies upon community leaders (from point 2 above) informing us so that we can share this information across the platform.

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4- Reward System

We know how difficult it is to find plagiarized content with many plagiarists paraphrasing content to cheat the system. We have decided to introduce a new reward system where we are going to redistribute our Steem Dollar author rewards:

• 25% to Plagiarism Finders
• 25% to Delegators
• 25% to Charities
• 25% Remain in Account

A detailed post about the rewards will be published soon.

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5- Warnings through @endplagiarism04

Warnings will now primarily be delivered through the #endplagiarism04 account instead of #endingplagisrism. We will highlight Plagiarised Content and its rewards on daily basis but do not have the Steem Power to downvote all rewards back to the pool.

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6- Discord Channel

We have started a Discord Channel where we can have some Good Chat, Appeals on Warnings, Silently Reporting Plagiarism, Spam, or Phishing Links. Would love to See you there:

Here is the Invitational Link:
https://discord.gg/H2azg59r9g

Best wishes,
@endplagiarism04 and @endingplagiarism