Abuse Series: Lies. Damn Lies. And Statistics.

         For those of you who are not familiar with the famous author, Mark Twain, my title is a reference to one of his "quotes", where he attributed it to a British Prime Minister, but it was never confirmed anywhere in known records the said official made such statement.

         I generally do not go out of my way looking for abuse. When I do, I always find my voting power drained quickly. While I wait for my VP to recharge as I spend my allocated time on the web, I often come across hilarious, yet somewhat infuriating, conversations unfold in various Discord channels.

         Some of my favorites are from the @steemcleaners Discord. You could never tell if people are serious about their pleas for innocence or if they are hoping that the volunteers are dumb enough to believe their stories.

_{All screenshots are taken by me, @enforcer48, for visual aid purposes. They are taken in a public forum, so I probably won't be upset if you use them for aid as long as you do not make them the sole content of your posts.}

         I find it amusing that someone could literally come into the @steemcleaners Discord and claim that a mistake was made and then proceeds to be shutdown by a passersby. Maybe the Steemian is unfamiliar with the way anti-abuse communities operate? When a flag comes at your direction, chances are it is well-supported in terms of evidence.

         The second screenshot is also great. The user claimed to have no idea what they had done wrong when the comment had a specific source attached along with the category of abuse listed. And then, there is this guy:

         This is the point where I would usually start laughing because of the absurdity of the continual denial. It almost makes you wonder if he thought he could make everything seem less atrocious by appealing to all the other times original contents were created. Of course, that statement was promptly shut down by a Steem Cleaner and a volunteer detective.

         To be fair to Aron, he is currently on a 60-day probation, and I have not seen him revisiting any of the anti-abuse servers recently. There is hope and redemption. In many of the communities I have visited, they often offer support to those Steemians found in the wrong. Whether the support comes in the form of assistance with creating original contents, or learning how to source formats, the common goal is not limited to only purging abuses on the platform.

We want people to learn. To evolve. To use their brain.

         In the example of @steemcleaners, they offer counselors that would devote their time to helping repentant Steemians on the road to better content creation. The abuse fighters from @steemflagrewards have shifted their approaches to warn newbies about spam and begging before downvoting. In the cases of blatant copy/paste and plagiarism, no such courtesy is given.

We do not systematically downvote newbies for the most minor of offenses. We encourage them to change their behaviors.

         Since it's Sunday, I would like to switch gears into a lighter note. Deceit is a common practice I witness as I traverse through the cyberspace around the Steem Blockchain.

<sub>Source

Source of meme template</sub>

         I did not explain myself the last post when I used the tags #upvoteplankton and #minnowuprising. For the month of July, 2018, I will be using these tags for a community effort to promote contents created by authors with minnow-sized SP and smaller.

         Abuse Series is a collection of essays of my personal journey across the blockchain.

Previous post: Sharing Contents on the Blockchain
Next post: Pretenders