Every time I view the feed I run into one of the news bots. They're pretty recognizable by the author: or source: part of the preview, but while they are easy to avoid they're still annoying. When I started using Steemit I muted several, but there always seemed to be more. I wasn't sure what to do about them so I started looking at their profiles to see what exactly they were doing. Here's my findings and what I've decided to do about them:
I'm going to use @jack.the.ripper as my example for this post, since he pops up in my feed the most. Every 5 minutes his bot scrapes the title, picture, and first paragraph of a news article and posts it with a link to the full article. He then uses all of the proceeds (100SBD and 21SP last week) to buy upvotes for his posts.
Here's why I believe this type of content is not acceptable on Steemit:
It is not original work. He is just copying someone else's work and getting rewarded from it.
It is not adding anything of value to Steemit. His short summaries contain almost no info and do nothing but send you away from Steemit.
So what would be an acceptable type of news themed post on Steemit? Well, you could post a list of your favorite articles of the day and your thoughts on them, or you could do some research and write your own. Steemit articles need to be unique and you, not just copy and paste.
So these news bots are spamming the feed with plagiarized content. What should we do about it? Should we flag them or just mute them?
I started this post undecided on what was the right course to pursue, but viewing some of the bots' blogs made up my mind. They're copying and pasting content, paying for upvotes, and violating Steemit's core principle of proof-of-work. This surely deserves a downvote! I'm not able to affect their 50+ reputation but I'll do my best to take some of the reward pool away from them and give it to the minnows who write thoughtful content.
Would you help me downvote these bots? Don't waste your time by hunting them down and depleting all your voting power, but if you're browsing the new feed and stumble across one of them, take the time to give it a quick flag. You'll have my and many other's thanks!
What's your view of the news bots? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
