Plagerism is becoming more and more of a problem on Steemit, which is a real shame because Steemit is my favourite platform to get and share information. I have heard excuses and justifications for plagiarism and I felt a need to speak out about it. Plagerism is intellectual theft, it is essentially profiting from other people's hard work by copy and pasting it. What is worse than that is putting it on a monetised platform and earning money off other people's work.
Plagerism is not acceptable, Steemit is a platform for people to share information and content that THEY create! If you don't have the intelligence, patience, honesty, and a willingness to put in effort to write your own content then you should not be on this platform.
Stealing content is not good for the Steemit platform and does not send a positive message to new users and outsiders. Serious content creators could be put off our platform if they see people making money off other people's hard work. In short, plagerism hurts the Steemit platform.
I usually have a live and let live attitude but stealing work from other people is not acceptable. I do not see how it is in anyway different than stealing business ideas or copying patented designs. Up until now have only downvoted content about 5 times, and that was for spam, but from now on I will start downvoting plagerism and I am hoping you guys will do the same. We need to send a message to content thieves that there is no money to be made plagiarising. I am getting tired of clicking on posts with an interesting title only to find content that I have already read word for word on one of the cryptocurrency news websites or in other Steemit blogs.
I wanted to publicly thank the cheetah bot and Steemcleaner for allowing users to easily identify stolen content and I hope you carry on the good work. I am fully aware that this post puts me at risk of losing some followers but that's okay. I don't want dishonest followers anyway.
Happy Investing
Cryptoviking
