I had a discussion recently with another steemian and curator in many different projects about ghostwriters. This started after I noticed a certain account who just magically became better at english/spelling over night so much so that I suspected it to be plagiarising but after not being able to find any sources of plagiarism I had to conclude that the author must have someone else write posts for him now.

The curator I discussed it with said she thought ghostwriting was okay and that "many probably do it" here on Steem. So I wanted to write a bit why I'm personally not okay with it after remembering that I wrote a post a long time ago talking about this where I for a brief moment considered having someone write posts for me but decided not to. The difference here would still be that if I was having someone ghostwrite for me, I would make it public in the post similar to the Fantasy Football posts where another author was writing them who received the post rewards in beneficiaries and it was noted in each post who the author was. So just to reiterate, I'd be okay with others posting something someone else wrote on their blog as long as it's public and the curators reading/curating it know about it - much like when authors decide to repost something it should let the curators know it is a repost and maybe even link to the original so they can decide if they want to re-reward it depending on what the original post made in rewards, etc. 

Anyway. As a manual curator this is not a big deal, I can often notice if someone's writing changes a lot over night and decide not to upvote it or maybe even downvote it for that reason alone (I haven't done that so far but I wanted to get your opinions on it first before making a decision). The problem, much like many other side-effects that come from it are autovotes and trail votes. Many keep saying we need a patreon on Steem even though I keep pointing them at Steemauto or the autovote service of @buildteam that I can't remember the name of right now. So one of the side-effects of autovotes in my opinion has been that authors get lazy when they know the votes are guaranteed. The quality may drop, the engagement of the author on his own posts or on other authors content may drop and in my opinion it's one of the saddest things to see an author reap rewards while barely replying to his comment section or acknowledging having read the comments with a vote. It also shows a lack of gratitude.

Now say someone in my position who's been writing on Steem for over 3.5 years now, even though I didn't focus on authoring for the first year cause I thought curation and raising engagement was more important (and sure it did help my follower amount but that's nothing to brag about today as it means literally nothing if most followers are gone and you get no engagement on your posts). Imagine if I hired a writer from say a part of the world where even a fraction of my post rewards would be worth it for them to ghost write and I'd be posting 2-3 times per day thanks to it. Let's say you find out I'm doing so, how would that make you feel?

Personally I'd kind of feel cheated as a curator. As a curator I don't always curate content just for the content. I curate the authors for the experiences I have with them, what I believe they bring to Steem other than the content and what they do for Steem otherwise. So in a way even manual votes are kind of like a Patreon service. You're investing in the users and not just the content, especially when Steem is still this young and content may not really have the value they are receiving today because they may not be bringing in new users or keeping users here from your content alone. We are still kind of at the phase where we have very little consumers and everyone wants to be an author, where comments are barely getting rewarded and engagement is low. I'm sure we are going to overcome these problems with SMT's, communities and easier onboarding, but to get back to the issue at hand - it wouldn't feel right to take a portion of the rewardpool when all I did was copy-paste someone elses work and reap in those autovotes or trail votes while only paying the original author part of them.

It would feel like free rewards and as a curator I would much rather upvote the original author if I knew who it was. I remember a case here on Steem two years ago or so where a ghostwriter found his post he had written on Steem and came here explaining his situation and received a lot of votes for it. That was kind of wholesome in my opinion cause he was from a country with a bad economy and told us that ghostwriting was one of his major incomes until he came to Steem himself and outed the author who was pretending to be writing the posts themselves.

So to keep this a bit shorter than it already is. I think ghostwriting should be okay unless you're trying to hide that fact. Even better would be if you created an account for that user and shared beneficiaries with him so everyone knows how much you're keeping yourself and how much is going to the real writer. I understand some may not want to post starting from scratch because they know it may take a long time to get a following and curation (even though curation is at an all time high right now and we're desperately missing content creators), but at least that way they would be open about it and curators could judge themselves how they want to reward such content knowing the details of the rewardsplit and the original author being okay with their cut.

Imagine if they are getting $2 per article while the poster here is getting $20 and like that old case those ghostwriters would sooner or later find their own articles (steem's google SEO is pretty strong so it shouldn't be too hard). I bet it would not feel great.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

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