Bot to detect plagiarism in the Dmania service - Intinte Filemon
@BernieSanders a month ago wrote about the problem with Dmania - It is a service on the Steem network that supports people who steal content. It can not be so bad after all, @ned supports them.
Well, that's a joke.
The interesting thing is that on Steem a very good article about eg physics earns $2 while stolen meme gets $50. Steal memes, earn millions.
I was wondering how to fight all the pathologies at Steem - Dmania, Dtube, Dlive. I do not know how to fight with Dtube and Dlive, but making a system to detect plagiarisms should be easy.
This is the reason why the "Filemon" project was created.
What is Filemon?
Filemon is basically a collection of three projects that together create a system to detect plagiarism:
- Filemon (engine) gets the last entry from Dmania (Created) and sends it to various services specializing in searching for similar images.
- Intinte Abstergo is an original engine to detect plagiarism written in PHP. It is based on a database from Quickmeme and Dmania (any photo that is not detected by Abstergo as plagiarism is added to the database)
- Filemon (web interface), parses data from database and displays as a simple HTML table.
How does this work?
Filemon (engine) gets the last entry from Dmania (Created) and extracts json_metadata. From there it reads the value of image (this is the link to the meme). Then the link is sent to sites such as Saucenao and Yandex. Values (0 for lack of plagiarism, 1 for possible plagiarism) are stored in variables. The file is then downloaded to the Intinte Abstergo engine, which modifies it and compares it with its database.
If the Intinte Abstergo engine detects plagiarism, it returns 1. If it does not detect it returns 0 and adds the image to its database.
Then all data is sent to the database, which is then available for the Filemon interface.
Is the project necessary?
83% of memes in Dmania are stolen. They earn various salaries - from a few cents to tens of dollars. A problem arises because creators creating their content from scratch get smaller upvote than if they stole it from the internet. The reason is that Steem is seen not as a good platform for content creation, but as a system that rewards thieves for being smarter than others who want to really build a platform.
Dmania (amongst others) is a disastrous project for the entire Steem ecosystem and if we don’t take the right steps, the whole platform can fall.
Are memes bad?
No, many people like memes and I believe they should be on Steem. But only original memes (created by users from scratch) should receive earnings. The remaining memes should not be monetized because the work put into their release is very small if it exists at all.
I care about quality. If we want people to use Steem, they must feel rewarded and supported. If my goal was to do Reward Pool Rape, I could earn a lot from Dmania.
My goal
My goal is to find an agreement in the Steem community. Many people are mad at the current situation in "decentralized" services (dmania, dtube, dlive). Very many of the content posted to the Steem blockchain is stolen, and official bots give very high prizes for them. The developers treat this as making money than creating networks and I am not surprised. In a week they earn more than the average content creator in half a year. Easy money.
Of course, I can easily convert the bot to flag plagiarisms (eg when two bots report them) or add a comment.
Statistics
Do you need a delegation?
For now, no (because I didn't implement comment / flag option).
But if you can, write to @fervi on steem.chat, that you would like to delegate Steem Power, if necessary, I will write to you.
Name
The name refers to the famous "Filemon" cat in Poland, which was the main character of cartoons and animated films for children.
Photo author: Maciek Szostek (Wikipedia; GNU FDL 1.2)
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
Very unique project. I hope this will end most of copy-pasted dMemes.
Maybe in the future this would even grow to good dTube/dLive plagiarism detector.
Thanks for the contribution. It has been approved.
Very cool idea for a project! Interested to see how it evolves!
One thing I'd definitely recommend for future contributions is that you indent your code properly, as currently its readability is very low because nothing is indented at all.
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Great to see that you are actively working on improving the Steem blockchain. We need people like you, who are willing to fight—even when it seems like trying to square the circle. If crap, and even worse—stolen content—earns so much, while good, quality content often gets overlooked, people won't be motivated to create good content. They'll either switch to creating poor content, or turn to other platforms. And none of these are good for us Steemit users.
Great project and writeup, very well executed and very much needed to stop the blockchain from filling up with refuse.
Thanks. I hope that I will at least partially solve the problems of Steem :)
Well I like your attitude to build something that would help improve the dmania platform. Unfortunately it already got stripped of its delegation, but that should not stop the platform to move ahead.
Everyone else is raising their voice about who is abusing what without really worried to bring something that can help fight those issues and make things better.
On a side note, it may also be worth to certify a meme to be original, because you are doing already the investigation. So why not pass the results .
Thanks. Our mission is to reduce abusing on every Steem Application. Dmania-bot (Filemon) was the easiest project, but maybe bigger problem is with Dtube / Dlive.
And maybe I should fork Filemon to check photography tags or something like that
The problem with memes is to define what an 'original meme' and what a 'stolen meme' is. If I take a meme and just change the picture or the text slightly, but use the same joke for 'my' meme, is it plagiarised?
But beside of that your project is a great idea and I wish you good luck with the further developement.
Of course. My question is. Is mem created in the meme generator should, for example, get $ 50 upvote? In my opinion, such high earnings should get memes made from scratch.
There would be no problem at all in existence without people like @ned supporting actively plagiarism.
I hope that by delegating Steem Power, he will also ask for control over the content appearing.
Sometimes I mark the stolen materials, which appear, for example, on dtube. But dtube has more and more of these materials, and no one controls it.
I was a huge fan of these websites, today I am their biggest opponent. I'm thinking now what to do with these websites, but I suspect that without a lot of computing power there will be a problem ...
Hey @fervi! Thank you for the great work you've done!
We're already looking forward to your next contribution!
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Great work, keep work the good work..
A unique project i must say..
Great project, hope it will be implemented in many places. And I hope you will receive some delegation to combat flags and retaliation from plagiarist. I will try to delegate also, please let me know where to delegate, when the time comes or if I can do it now. Peace
I don't have enough free servers :( But I think dmania is a bigger problem than other services "photo only".
For now, I create another bot (but of course I also develop this, eg the web interface is nicer now). Do you have the same nickname for Steem chat?
http://ressteem.tk/Filemon/bootstrap.php
I don't use steem chat to much, but you can contact me on discord if you want. Same name.
https://discord.gg/g6UHwXE
Please write to me (@fervi)