^{Image Source: Pexels}

A Few More Guidelines as to What Constitutes Abuse.

One of the largest bots in the ecosystem @MinnowBooster recently needed to update its Terms of Service (TOS) in order to combat the rampant abuse taking place using its voting service. I'll just go over a few of the main points although for the complete picture, the post can be read here:

https://steemit.com/minnowbooster/@minnowbooster/minnowbooster-updated-terms-of-service-tos

The following are the new updated guidelines of use of the service (I have received permission to publish this content from @MinnowBooster):

What constitutes abuse of @minnowbooster?

Using multiple accounts to post duplicate content and 
purchasing MB upvotes for all of them

Same goes for using multiple accounts to post low 
quality content just to farm Minnowbooster for profits

Upvoting posts with MB that are written in a copy / paste style

Using a MB vote for very short or repetitive content. 

Length is subjective, but 150 words is a good safe guideline.

Posting duplicate content is just asking to get blacklisted. Steemians want to read original content made by you! We want this to be a living breathing platform, not a boring repository of copy paste internet materials compiled as simply a means to milk the reward pool.

Short content is fine but again its a very subjective thing to decide if a one line poem deserves 100 dollars in posting rewards... Perhaps you could write something below your poem? Tell your readers what inspired you to write it? Maybe add a few pictures if there was any visual inspiration involved?

Photography Post Rules:

Single photo posts are not allowed.

Photography posts must contain supporting text 
and show significant effort in terms of 
production value (location, setup, lighting and subject) 
to be considered boostable.

Again this seems reasonable. If you are a photographer, why not place a few pictures in a post rather than just a single image? If you really want to show off a single image because you're incredibly proud of it, that's fine too, I'm sure if you are that passionate about it you could write a few paragraphs about the experience of getting that magical shot right?

Public Domain Content:

Sources and Authors used in posts must be 
correctly cited and linked to original content

This is a very important point. As a writer on Steemit you should try your absolute best to follow academic standards. You can write about whatever you want, you can use the work of others and stand on their shoulders but you must do it the correct way.

Lets say that I wanted to quote a snippet from an article I enjoyed. Instead of copying and pasting it into my post, I would format it as a quote and tell readers where I got the information from in the source list below. Don't know what I'm talking about? Let me show you a few screenshots of an article I recently wrote on @techblogger.

Here is the article:

This was written about a robotic pet that can help remind you to be more social... I know right?! What's going on with the world these days eh?

Anyways, let me show you where I needed to quote some information from the article in which I learned about this new and strange pet.

Notice the middle paragraph is a different shade and indented? This was copied and pasted from the original article in which I sourced. If you would like to do this but don't know how, the Steem markup language requires a (>) in front of the text which it will convert to the formatting which I have shown above. Finally it is important for my readers to know where I got this quote from. I provide a list of my sources at the end of my article. This can be seen in the image below:

So there you have it. If you want to write about a topic and you are using research materials to create it follow the method in which I taught above and you'll be on par with the world's greatest academics. Lets keep things civil and high brow on the Steem blockchain shall we?

^{Image Source: Pexels}

I know my fellow @ADSactly society members know how important it is to protect Steem and maintain it as the top crypto platform for social interaction. We don't want farmers, plagiarists or spammers clogging up the feeds. We want real posts made by real people. I hope some of these ideas have helped clarify what I feel constitutes abuse and in knowing we can all be aware of these guidelines as we continue to write and publish to our heart's content.

Once I found Steem I was amazed that someone hadn't thought of it earlier! If you have already moved from Facebook to Steem, I commend you.

We can make Steem what we want it to be. It's a community effort after all.

What do you think about the abuse taking place on the blockchain? How can we promote a healthier environment for original content producers? How can we help them get more visibility for their outstanding content?

Here's a chance for the @ADSactly community to leave their thoughts and opinions on this topic!

Thanks for reading.

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Authored by: @techblogger

In-text citations sources:

"MinnowBooster - Updated Terms of Service (ToS)" - MinnowBooster

Image Sources:

MinnowBooster, Pexels

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