Intention is to make sure that plagiarists don't get rewarded. Sharing what other people have done is OK as long as you at least give a link to the original. Preferably also add your own commentary and explain why the material is worth of looking.
We are not censoring anything, we just try to channel the rewards for users that are producing the best content. Plagiarists don't produce anything new, so they don't deserve to be rewarded.
I agree with that. But making a police force is not the way to do it. That has completely ruined reddit.
Encouraging embedding solves both problems without creating a police force, or policemen, or automated downvoting bots...
(edit:Ok bacchist, whatever. Just watch what happens when a content police force gets created. It will turn into their job, and then give them some power, and turn them into either power mods or ai bot runners, which will turn to crap just like reddit.)
(edit: yes tuck, it's the ones that want to that become a problem, and there is already a content scanning downvote bot. You want power hungry reddit mods here, censoring people and things for political reasons? because that's how it starts. Users ignoring or downvoting should be enough, everything else will just waste effort and cause problems.)
The "policing" (using your term) done here is completely voluntary by people who don't want to see plagiarist get rewarded at the expense of the journalist. It's not something any of us want to do, but feel it should be done to send a message to others that they will not be rewarded for this practice on Steemit. Hopefully it will deter it from ever being done in the future so that no one has to hunt these post down and take time out of their schedule to downvote and post why they downvoted.
Some members are looking into a plagiarism API, but it cost money. So in the meantime some of us have chosen to do it manually. It's not organized, we simply choose to talk to each other and point out repeat abusers on slack when we feel like it. Lately, I don't feel like it and others have come along to fill in, because they want to apparently.
You do know what a police force is, right?