I made a post yesterday highlighting how low the standards to be a witness on Steem have fallen recently. I pointed out that one of the new witnesses only had a few posts, all of them either begging for resteems or plagiarizing content from somewhere online. It might seem weird to get hung up on the plagiarism aspect but I worked for steemcleaners long enough that you just get an eye for when an article is unoriginal. Plus I think that its not too much to ask that a witness at least produce their own content.
I assumed that even by shitty witness standards that yesterdays post would be an outlier but lo and behold I took a gander at the newest top 20 steem witness menacamel today.
What do we know about him?
It looks like he joined steemit 8 days ago and appears to speak arabic. In that time has made 4 posts, his very first post appears to be a direct copy of this article from 2015
For comparison sake, both translated to English-
Menacamel-
The system of integration in the field of applied engineering is the process of collecting subsystems into one system, and making sure that it works as one unit, but in the field of software, this system is a process of linking computer systems, differently, with each other, with applications, both functionally and financially To work as one coordinated unit.
Source Article-
The system of integration in the field of applied engineering is the process of collecting subsystems into one system, and making sure that it works as one unit, but in the field of software, this system is a process of linking computer systems, differently, with each other, with applications, both functionally and financially To work as one coordinated unit.
I'll spare you the rest but it is a long article and it all seems to be copied word for word.
For his second post he decided to copy/paste the well known tale of the Bitcoin pizza. While I can't find the direct source the post clearly isn't original and definitely doesn't source anything.
So his first 2 posts are plagiarized, what about the other 2?
Alas, I can't give you more info on those posts. Sure, they exist, but for some reason instead of posting text he has started posting images of text which means I can't translate them without being able to read arabic. Based on the translated title of this post -
"A program presented to the Arab Steam community of celebrities, artists, writers, news and media .. to promote constructive ideas and present the best'
It seems like it might be an intro post to running his witness but again, there is no way to know. What is the point of posting a picture of the text instead of just typing it out?
The same goes for his most recent post, it seems like generic copy/paste again with a title of "The second technological revolution "blockchain" and cryptocurrencies" but again its just images of text so it's a lot harder for me to know where he got it or how original it is.
Why do these people get to be witnesses?
That one is at least a little more straightforward to answer. The @steemit account and its 29 million SP and the @hkdev404 and its 4 million SP have set the @dev365 account as their proxy. Basically that means that the @dev365 account gets to set whoever it chooses as the 20 witnesses. Not exactly the most decentralized way to go about choosing witnesses but there doesn't seem to be a ton of options left there either. Outside of the sockpuppets there are only 6 other witnesses currently in the top 100 running the Justin Sun preferred version 22.5
I wasn't expecting to do another one of these posts but I also didn't think there would be another witness thrust into the top 20 yesterday with less than 5 posts and half of those plagiarized.If by some chance someone speaks arabic, feel free to let me know in the comments what his witness post actually says.
I considered calling them out but this is what people who are clinging to the sinking ship of Steem want. It's not our job to help them unfuck their stupid mistake, or point out the gaping cracks in the foundation of Steem. They'll find out eventually, or if not just be wondering why they're holding bags on a broken network.
Just like how Justin plagiarized his white paper, he is doing the same with the new sock puppets.
I think its like the minimum you should ask of a witness, to have an original thought and be able to communicate it. Once you get past that then we can talk about if you are qualified, do you views align with mine, etc..
There are witnesses over there who actually seem interested like @steemchiller or the group behind @dev.supporters, they seem to at least come off as competent but damn I didn't expect the bar to be that low now for the rest...