Thank you for catching this issue. A response to plagiarism in my articles.
Hello Friends,
- First, Thanks for catching the issues of plagiarism in my articles!
- Second, I had no intention to defraud or take advantage of the hive community.
- Third, I am sorry this happened and have taken action to correct this path.
While you have the right to pass judgment as you see fit, below is the story of what happened, why I am thankful, and what actions I have taken and my apology.
What happened :
Currently, I am working on a web page to promote tourism in Danang, Vietnam.
The vision is to provide a place for visitors to learn about attractions in and around Danang, help community projects, and be a hub to unite local Vietnamese and tourists.
The primary way we will attract visitors is from posters in shops and handouts. Not so much targeting SEO and ranking articles on the web. (*It's related to the issue)
To get a first-hand experience of the local areas, I thought it would be best to hire a native Danang local Vietnamese to travel to various locations, take photos, and write about the place. ** Remember this point for later, please.
I put a call out on my FB page looking for a content writer.
Out of everyone who submitted, one person wrote to me and submitted an article they wrote in the past as per my request. I ran that article through the Grammarly plagiarism check, and it came back clean. I also met this person before in person, they were friendly and well-spoken, we got along well. They needed to work as covid was hard on them and their family, it seemed like a win / win.
In talking with them, I stressed the need for original content.
Anyways, I got the articles (the First 3), and they looked good; I had no reason to believe they would be heavily plagiarised.
As the target web page was not trying to gain views from SEO content (*and was on own project), I thought to post the articles first to Travel Feed to help HIVE and Travel feed get better SEO ranking, then RE-Post the pieces to the web page so that the web page would get a minor SEO hit for not posting original content, but that would be ok as SEO was not our path to quire visitors.
At best, I would make back the cost of hiring the content writer, and at worst, HIVE / Travel Feed would get some extra SEO love.
I did spell check and rewrote for continuity the article about the beach in Grammarly and got no hits for plagiarism:
- Not sure why it says 1%... Nothing was highlighted.
So, at least in my mind, the Vietnamese person I hired followed my ask when I was interviewing them; they confirmed they understood the importance of no Plagiarism; Grammarly picked up no issues on the beach article... so I thought the pieces were good.
I assumed, and that was wrong.
Again, I thought everyone was winning here.
- A local was earning money doing what they love, writing and taking photos of Vietnam.
- Hive / Travel feed would get good original content indexed into the search engines.
- The web page would get its articles for tourism.
- I may break even on article costs so I could hire them again.
Turns out my assumption on this was and is wrong. :(
So yes, I do have deep disappointment and sadness here.
I really am truly sorry. I worked hard to carve out my place on HIVE, and this is not acceptable.
Further for your consideration
- I have been on Steemit and then moved to HIVE since the start.
- I have written many, many, many original articles on travel, life, games, photography, and so much more.
- Hive has been kind to me, and I believe in it (*that is why I keep a lot powered up)
- I have no desire to take advantage of the payout system or defraud this platform.
- Yes, I know the desire for original content; I share that desire.
- My intent was not to post plagiarized content, and I thought I took the steps necessary to ensure the content was original.
If you wish to keep me on a black list for this, I accept your judgment. I would ask, however, that you look at my track record as an accurate indicator of my character and intent and the information I posted above about what happened.
Why I am thankful for finding these issues.
I am thankful for this as I was going to hire this author and pay in advance for 20 articles at x2 the rate. Since I did not see any issues in the original article (*The beach one and the one they submitted), I believed they were submitting original content to me.
While I could not catch the plagiarism issues, Hive did, which is great.
I will note be hiring this author.
What action am I taking
After posting this article, I will be deleting the content in the plagerised articles.
- https://peakd.com/hive-163772/@jacuzzi/the-danang-dragon-bridge
- https://peakd.com/hive-163772/@jacuzzi/the-danang-love-bridge
- https://peakd.com/hive-163772/@jacuzzi/discover-the-white-sands-of-my-khe-beach-danang-vietnam
And replacing it with a link to this post.
I will also be removing those article from my web page I am working on and will not be using them.
Lastly I terminated my working relationship with this author.
- I will also take a 7-day suspension from posting on HIVE under my account.
An ask
It is up to you, and your choice is your choice.
I would ask you to remove the downvotes on my other articles, as I invested a lot of time and effort into them and believed I was taking steps to ensure the content was original and would benefit Hive.
Thank you for your time and attention on this.
@livinguktaiwan
@hivewatchers
@buildawhale
@azircon
@adamada
@antisocialist
@dlmmqb
@bestofph
@xxeldal
@pinmapple
@travelfeed
@xecency
Best Regards,
Oh, these downvotings are nasty.
Thanks for clarifying the matter. I hope the downvoters accept it and that they'll stop soon.
Great to have you on Hive 🤠
If it came up with 0 plagiarism, where did the plagiarism come from? I'm a little confused.
It's silly to assume so-called checkers will catch spinning/rewording, etc.
I am not sure what tools were used to find the issues. I ran it through Grammarly running on the Brave browser, and it came back ok for me. But there were issues.
The plagiarism is listed in the comments of the article.
The local I hired, I think, copied and pasted snippets from other pages without citing the sources. So, not one full article, but paragraphs or stats from other web pages about the topic.
I do take the responsibility, and yes, it's not good and is unacceptable.
Just wondering what the path forward is from here.
Will I be downvoted from here on out?
I'm not invested in the issue but I agree with the downvotes. If the trail lead I'm in makes the call to keep downvoting, I'll get behind it considering it's a pain in the ass to manually undownvoted and more convenient to follow a dv trail for cases like these. I think it's well deserved even if you were sincere about overlooking this small mistake. Just the consequences of a damaged reputation. It's not the end of the world, probably just going to ruin your Hive experience. Never hire freelancers to ghost write for you, and if caught, admitting you hired one doesn't make your case any better, arguably, it most likely made things even worse. See how @purepinay drama went down.
As Hivewatchers stated in their comment to you you can go to their Discord and appeal in their appeals channel.
I did appeal to have watchers already and they said I'm not on any Blacklist with them.
The issue is that they're still people who are downvoting me without providing a reason or path forward.
People don't need to give you a reason to DV, just like they don't for an UV.
You asked a third party to write for you and you posted it for rewards. That's ghost writing and it's frowned upon at hive. For that single reason I can and I will DV you. So now I have given you explanation.
Sorry about this, I immediately thought of the purepinay saga. I have seen too many situations where this has happened, so I always encourage Hivers to write their own original content. I hope you are able to sort this out and move forward on Hive. It's a bummer to lose your ASEAN Hive delegation , but I understand given the circumstances.
Hello my friend thank you for the kind words. I really depends what happens on my next post and if it gets down voted or not.
I've been on hive for a long time, wrote numerous original articles, onboarded people and even help restart the Vietnamese Hive community. I really do love this platform and have no reason to try to scam or take advantage of it.
The people only judge you on when you mess up and don't take into account the long history.
I do realize that that plagiarism is bad and it's not something I want to engage in. I think plagiarism takes advantage of other creators and content. I would be bummed if someone stole my work as well.
I really thought I checked stuff, I thought I was hiring a local Vietnamese guy to help me because they would have a better first-hand account of the different locations in town.
I fucked up. Yes. And now it seems that 3 years worth of content building and networking is lost and no one wants to take a second look and look at someone's history and be like hey they've done a lot of good writing, hey they posted a lot of original content and ideas, it doesn't seem like something they would do so perhaps they're telling the truth.
Anyway today is my birthday. I was hoping to do a nice birthday post do some giveaways, but no.
If this thing does sort itself out I'm happy to redelegate to your community. I do believe in the Asian Hive community I do have a deep love for Vietnam. That's why I was making a travel website for it.
Just so mad at this.
Again though thank you for the support.
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