SteemSTEM and Cheetah

In recent weeks, more and more people have been complaining to steemcleaners (and it seems @guiltyparties in particular) that cheetah is the reason they didn’t get curated by steemSTEM. As that is not entirely correct, we chose to give out a statement.

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How does cheetah even work?

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Cheetah is a bot, that means for the initial comment, there isn’t a human checking your post. It’s scanned and compared to content found on the web, to spot any copies. If it finds something, it leaves a comment and upvotes the post.

This alone is not a reason to not get a steemSTEM vote!

If the link left by cheetah isn’t even remotely related to what you’ve posted, you can contact @patrice and she will change the comment. If cheetah is correct and the link it left is indeed one of your sources – which you quoted correctly! – just answer to cheetah, telling it that yes, this is your source. Nothing further is required.

But the last option requires you to quote your sources correctly. That does not mean it’s ok to copy a large amount of text, as long as you mention the website you got it from at the end. Try to only directly copy short quotes (if you have to), write what you want to write in your own words, add your own content and quote the source. No, BuzzFeed is not a good source for scientific content – as long as you’re not writing about the phenomenon of “10 things that will surprise you!” lists.

If you have, in fact, plagiarized, your post will not be curated by steemSTEM. But that is not cheetah’s fault, only your own. And if cheetah has to warn you several times, you will be blacklisted and flagged by it. At that point, a vote by steemSTEM is very, very unlikely.

Other reasons you might get blacklisted are identity theft or deception, for which the blacklisting is immediate and permanent.

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I am not blacklisted and steemSTEM still didn’t vote my post!

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Here is a list of reasons why your post might not have been upvoted:

1. You’ve broken copyright law with the pictures you are using. No, “google images” is not a picture source. No, not every picture can be used for commercial purposes (which Steem is!). No, just because you “found it on the web” doesn’t make it free of copyright. Please click here for our post on copyright.
2. Your post isn’t up to our standards. If you want to know what those are, click here.
3. You keep asking us why your post didn’t get curated/only got such a low vote. Don’t do that. We get so many of these messages each day and in 99.9% of cases, there’s a good reason we didn’t curate it. We’re not that many people, we all have responsibilities outside of Steem and we absolutely do not have the time to explain to you in detail why we didn’t vote your post. You are not entitled to a vote, just because you tagged your post steemstem!
4. Your post reads like a Wikipedia article and is as exciting as a soggy piece of bread.
5. We simply didn’t see it. Sorry, there are so many posts with the tag on a daily basis, and we check the other related tags (science, technology, …) too. Just keep posting good content, we will see you at one point. And if you can’t wait, because you want your money, now! … You might have missed the point of this initiative. We’re not here to give you the highest payouts possible. We’re here to give STEM a place on the blockchain – not make individual posters rich.
   If you’re curious about how the curation progress works or what the general structure of our community is, click here.

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In Conclusion

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Getting a comment from cheetah is not the end of the world – as long as it’s a false positive. And even then, you have plenty of time to change our behavior for the better.

If you’re not getting curated, there’s a reason. Don’t message the curators about it, the probability of it changing things for the better is low. It’s more likely that we remember you in a negative way.

If you need anything from us (that isn’t upvotes), please contact our Public Relations Representative @suesa because that’s why we have her. The other members of steemSTEM management are not the correct people to contact, if there are any problems that aren’t specifically linked to them.

We hope that this post clears some things up and maybe reduces the panic felt by a few when cheetah comments.

Keep creating great content!

@suesa