Approximately two months ago, four of my posts were tagged by hivewatchers as being in some way abusive to hive and the hive community. Since then, I have been added to the hivewatchers blacklist. This post is part of the appeals process to remove my name from the blacklist.
These abusive posts fell into two categories as identified by hivewatchers:
1). recycling old posts
Recently, I had been going through some of my old posts. I'm talking really old here from back in the Steemit days before Hive existed. A lot of them had broken image links and other minor issues. I decided to repost some of them with these minor fixes as it didn't really make sense to me to update the old ones. Hive-watchers considers this to be spam or otherwise low value and abusive and suitable for flagging or cause for blacklisting since the changes were minor and there was no substantial new content.
2). Plagiarism or copy/paste
The posts in question had the table of contents from the magazine the post was about. This inclusion of the table of contents without sufficient sourcing was considered to be plagiarism. At the end of the day, I think the issue was really that there was not enough original content with most of the text being the table of contents itself.
I would point out that, at the time, I was in no way being intentionally abusive and felt a bit abused by hivewatchers myself, not entirely agreeing with their characterizations. However, if anyone feels defrauded, misled, abused, disappointed or otherwise put out by these posts, I am truly sorry. That was absolutely NOT my intent. Like most people, I find earning a little crypto to be part of the appeal of hive. However, I don't want to earn it at the expense of others in dishonest ways or even in ways that are perceived to be dishonest or abusive. For anyone in the hive community who feels these posts were an abuse of the community, I apologize. I can only say once again that this was not my intent and that I didn't see it that way at the time. However, I have taken steps to address the issues hivewatchers identified.
I believe that I have addressed the issues that hivewatchers identified in the following ways: I have not since nor will I ever repost my old content from hive/steem unless it is a complete rewrite with substantial new content. Also, while I still make magazine related posts, the format has been changed and the summaries are all my original content with the table of contents only used as an outline.
The abusive posts in question are listed below. Please see the commentary from hivewatchers in those posts for more info or feel free to ask me any questions here.
https://hive.blog/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/family-computing-february-1984-cb2b1e2488995
https://hive.blog/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/commodore-sx-64-executive-64 (note: I think I removed all the text in this one after it was flagged)
https://hive.blog/hive-140217/@darth-azrael/nintendo-power-november-1995-6ce3f2d959f57
https://hive.blog/retrocomputing/@darth-azrael/byte-the-small-systems-journal
F*** em....
Sometimes you'll run into the control freaks on the chain. Hopefully, they just back off of you. You've always been a good dude to people and helping them out, also you are active on the chain too in comment sections. I stand with you. Keep posting man, you're doing great.
Thanks, I appreciate the support. Right now I am trying to navigate through the appeals process to get off the blacklist. That involves making an "apology post" with certain info (which I THINK I've covered above) and then posting for 30 days without further transgressions. However, I'm having a hard time getting hivewatchers to even acknowledge I've made this post yet in their discord channel. It's starting to feel like I must have pissed someone off. I probably shouldn't have argued with them but it's not like I was making personal insults, just objecting to their characterization of those posts, especially when they started using words like "fraud".
I'm not entirely certain what being on their blacklist does to me (other than the mildly irritating spaminator downvote on every single post and comment I make...isn't that itself abusive behavior?), but I suspect it impacts curation from certain individuals and groups.
And now of course I'm paranoid about everything I post. For example, I regularly make posts on old slides I'm scanning where there is a significant amount of repeated text that covers background info. Personally, I think that is useful to have in every post but I've seen hivewatchers go after things like that so it seems like another one of those things they might call abusive. I don't think it is but clearly I've been "wrong" before. I ended up cutting it back.
I appreciate the need to identify spammers, scammers, identity thieves and other abusers but I'm starting to think this group has way too much influence. I've seen more than one good person driven off the platform because of them. They don't even bother to give warnings...or at least I didn't get one. The whole thing was odd really. They commented on and flagged a few of my posts, I argued with them but immediately changed my posting behavior so as to address the issues they had, then two months later I show up on the blacklist and started getting the spaminator downvotes with no further comments. I tried to get clarification thinking maybe they had found something else they thought was abusive but I didn't really get any.
Then there is the fact that the "appeals" process isn't really an appeal. It's a sentence to be carried out under threat of extortion after which you MAY be granted parole. There is no actual group or organization to make a real appeal to. It's a bit like getting arrested by a certain police department and then having to "appeal" to that same police department. That kind of behavior seems far more abusive to me than some of what they identify as abuse. I'm sure they see it differently.
I would have thought reposting old content was OK. Something posted back in 2016, revamped for 2021 and posted for leofinance or some other new community. Don't see any issue with that.
Mostly I was just fixing broken image links and clearing out some old footer garbage. I guess I could have just edited the original posts but I figured there was no point as old posts tend to never get seen. Even navigating to my own old posts is a challenge that involves endless scrolling. I figured I had many different followers from when I made the posts 4-5 years ago on steemit so if I'm bothering with the updates, why not repost?
Anyway, I didn't think it was a big deal either but apparently it is. I mean, I understand how constantly reposting could be abusive if done in excess but I didn't think I was doing that. Live and learn I guess and I'll avoid it in the future.
I'll learn from your experience also. Thanks for posting about it.
Reporting old content is not ok, that's why there is a 7 day payout window so posts are not rewarded perpetually. Some of my best posts were made in the early days, if I just spent 30 seconds reposting them every day I'd make a killing for my effortless content the rest of the year or two.
That wasn't my intent. The posts that I was reposting had originally been posted on Steem. Image links were broken on the posts in question and there were some other formatting issues I wanted to take care of. I elected to repost instead of editing the original. People don't have to vote on it and the people that did vote on it probably never saw the originals that were posted 4 to 5 years ago on Steem anyway. Again, I get how that behavior CAN be abusive...if for example all I did every day was spend 30 seconds reposting old content as you suggest...but that's not what I was doing.
I only did that for a handful of posts and that was months ago. I stopped doing that as soon as hivewatchers let me know they had a problem with it. That didn't stop them from blacklisting me though.