I'm going to put this out here so it's clear as this message is being sent to pretty much everyone on Steemit that has more than 5 SP.
@ran-a-banana was banned from @buildawhale about a month ago for spam and stealing images. He lost I believe 2 SBD due to our no refund policy on blacklisted users. This is before we blacklisted dmania and steepshot (due to the massive abuse caused by them and the low to zero effort content created.
I told @ran-a-banana I would look into his case because he lost 2 SBD as he was manually blacklisted prior to the black listing of the dmania tag (which is a refund case). I looked into his case and decided since he stole most of his memes from Reddit, Tumbler, and other sites I felt it was nothing something I would refund. Prior to making a decision, he harassed me and my staff on our Discord.
During the next 30 days, he posted 2-5 memes a day stating the blacklist is a fraud and a scam while upvoting them for $10-30 with bid bots. I left it alone as there is no reasoning with people who are upset with the blacklist, I am frequently flagged, abused, and threatened as a result of blacklisting people. Something that costs me an endless amount of time and means my bot makes far less than any other bot at equal SP as spammers are the most profitable users. That can be confirmed by looking at the SteemBotTracker and seeing @buildawhale frequently has 5-100% positive ROI where most pots are -5-45% ROI.
@ran-a-banana and @garudi both have hijacked my threads and post endless memes about myself, @buildawhale, and our blacklist.
I could go on, it's been going on for 30 days 2-5 each all pounded by vote bots. I left it alone until recently when I started flagging some of the slanderous ones. My threads started getting hijacked more, so I decided every time he wastes my time I would flag a post that he either slanders me or uses a stolen image. Needless to say, this went on a for a bit today.
I am getting tired of having to deal with flags, abuse, and threats while trying to clean the garbage on this platform and prevent my bot being used to reward it.
This brings me to another issue, something that has driven the amount of spam into overdrive... dmania.
Dmania posts are reward with $10-100 or so votes based on how many rewards they have in the post and some other criteria. This creates an incentive to buy lots of bid bot votes on memes to fish for those large votes. The typical dmania user posts 5 or more memes a day, the majority of them are not original and just stolen from Reddit, Facebook, Tumbler, or their grand mother's inbox.
This is the type of reward you can get from @dmania for a meme.
The meme for this reward?
Just another one of the thousands of stolen images daily submitted to dmania. Not original content, not proof of brain, just whatever they can find in the first 2 seconds of opening Google or Reddit. That post is rewarded $75 USD and it's something a 5-year-old could likely be trained to do.
So yes, I flagged his posts, not to censor him, not to "kill his voice", but because he won't stop slandering or harassing me over his 2 SBD and 90% of his content is stolen.
Just today he received $45 dollars from Dmania for this:
I hate flagging, it's a waste of time and money, but when you blacklist users for the abuse they don't stop harassing and they get abusive.
Either we want to accept the spam and be willing to let it get rewarded or we attempt to stop it. Currently, out of the 50+ bots very few bots even use a blacklist, even fewer update it, and most don't spend hours only a daily basis proactively hunting down spammers.
@ran-a-banana is going to see and respond to his post and the first thing he is going to say that we profit from blacklisting and it's a big scam. We do not refund for blacklist, this was clear the day I started @buildawhale, there are no refunds for plagiarism and spam. The main reason behind this is because these users have profited likely for a long time before getting caught by abusing our bot as well as others, and any refund we give will just be given to another bot that doesn't blacklist (which out of the 50+ here, I'd say 45+ don't blacklist because of these reasons and the loss of revenue). I also spend an insane amount of time researching, verifying, blocking, flagging, and dealing with the retaliation as a result of trying to make Steemit better.
My original plan was to create a global blacklist and funds were going to go to that project, but since then I lost @freedom's vote which pushed me from #38 witness to #59, and my delegator increased my rent over 200%. I still spend 10-40 hours finding and preventing spam from being rewarded using @buildawhale. I share my blacklist with whoever is willing to take it (currently no one, but in the past, a couple have taken me up on it) so that all the bots can help enforce this standard.
So if you got a memo about this, now you know the situation.
To be honest, I'm tired of posting about spam, I'm tired of putting the posts in trending, but I was accused of enabling spam because I wasn't public about it. Not everyone agrees with bid bots, but bid bots do not create the spam and they don't have to reward it either. It takes work, a lot of work and people are going to be pissed, and they are going to kick and scream and retaliate as long as no one wants to spend their voting power to discourage this behavior.
Why you should vote me as witness
Witness & Administrator of four full nodes
My recent popular posts
The truth and lies about 25% curation, why what you know is FAKE NEWS
WTF is a hardware wallet, and why should you have one?
GINABOT - The Secret to your Sanity on Steemit
How to calculate post rewards
Use SSH all the time? Time for a big boy SSH Client
How to change your recovery account
How curation rewards work and how to be a kick ass curator
Markdown 101 - How to make kick ass posts on Steemit
Work ON your business, not in your business! - How to succeed as a small business
You are not entitled to an audience, you need to earn it!
How to properly setup SSH Key Authentication - If you are logging into your server with root, you are doing it wrong!
Building a Portable Game Console
well, yer a badass! I hope that global blacklist still comes true though! we neeeds it!
I appreciate your hard work, man. You really do it to it. sorry you lost that big vote :(
You were one of the first, if not the actual first, witness I ever voted for. I thought witness votes were all equal and not dependent on what rank we are?
Weight of your witness vote depends on your Steem Power.
This
@themarkymark, I think you should add to the bot's status message that voting dmania and steepshot is deactivated with no refunds.
By the way, does your bot vote Dlive posts?
We automatically refund dmania and steepshot.
We do allow dlive.
Thanks for the shout out! 😄 Really funny stuff.
dmainia posts make that much... Wow I should make a meme account and just shit-post memes every day. I mean hell it takes what? 30 seconds to make a meme, if I make 5-10 posts a day with an average of $10 a post then it will only take me like a month to really make a similar amount of SP as on my main account
Make a meme, lol that’s so last year. Now you just steal them off Reddit and get $90 for it.
Well I like to be old fashioned. So instead of stealing memes, let me just quickly make a program that generates the captions for a meme and then I will quickly produce them without actually making them.
What precisely is a meme?
Technically a meme as an arbitrary unit of culture. Specifically what we are referring to is a picture with a caption that people relate to
Of I understand correctly, it are those pictures that most of the time show something at a funny way.
How can I create those? Is there some kind of special software?
MSPaint
Gimp
https://imgflip.com/memegenerator
Photoshop
...
I believe there are even apps on android and Iphone
I think what I can add in here is that, it pays to be original 247
there is no guarantee, especially on Steemit, but it's the right thing to do.
There is a reason why we have words such as "slander" and "libel".
I have given my witness vote to you now :) it may help you little bit :)
Thanks
Original content is Queen of the Heap!! Thank you for highlighting this seriously crap rape & pillage mentality. Plagiarism is insidious and something we should all be vigilant about. As should crediting image sources EVERYtime we use something that is not our own original content.
Saying EVERYONE is copying and pasting there work is a little harsh I make all my own memes each one can take me over an hour EASILY...I beleive a good meme is worth every bit as much as anything else on here... What would you do if you couldn't promote the post you made? It would go unnoticed just like everyone else's something has too be done about that, anyway not getting involved just defending myself and the rest of people who do create original work here, cheers.
If you do make your own memes, that's awesome but most don't. They are just stealing 5 memes a day and posting them hoping to win the dmania vote jackpot. I'd rather see the garbage on trending than people getting $100 for something they stole off Google.
I hear what your saying and I don't like seeing worthless copy paste stuff being upvoted either it makes me mad.
Dude I love dmania but there is sooo many people getting huge rewards for stealing memes. I've been tempted to make another account and post 10 stolen memes and pay for some upvotes. There is no doubt I would make a lot more. Of course the few original memes I made didn't catch that sweet $100 upvote.
good job
Keep up the good work!
I'm neither a big fan of paid upvote bots. As I think they encourage scams and frauds. And if everyone would put the same effort in it as you, that could be easily killed. But my feeling says you are alone in this world. So in worst case this could kill Steemit. Let's hope it won't get this far, cause in essence Steemit is a brilliant platform.
Hi master - you have a little typo at the start with @buildawhale - just saying :-)
Fixed thanks.
With out the hard work people flagging dmaina spam and stolen images we would have way more..
Maybe we need a flagging bot for spam dmaina poat
very good upvote
I want to support you! Resteemed this post.
Please don't stop your work on the blacklist. It's the reason I chose to support your witness yesterday. I just wish now that I had been supporting you longer.
I'm trying, but to be honest I'm getting fairly discouraged.
Thank you for your comments and opinions. I appreciate the feedback.
This platform needs more people like you or else it will be lost in the sea of spam.
🗅
You know... #thatsthejoke