Has anyone noticed the current plague of the plagiarists?
I didn't have time for much posting today but do like to keep on top of things and still input to the community, so...
I browse to new posts and scroll down clicking the occasional article I found interesting. I read one on artificial intelligence - excellent I thought, give that a vote and a comment. But no, cheetah had gotten there first. I looked at cheetah's source link, the steemit article was a blatant rip off.
Not put off I scrolled on.. oooo, an article on Edward Snowden. Nope, mostly plagiarised. Again helped by cheetah's spot!
Onward I marched my heart beginning to lie heavy in my chest. For the love of steem I thought... Let me find some new voice that wrote their own post!!!
Oh aye, what's this? A post about Swedish pyramids? Intriguing!! NOPE, COPIED!!!
Arrgh, seriously. It makes browsing for new content a right pain in the chuff at times. Still, you can't let them win so despite this plague I will go on, looking for new voices and interesting people to follow that aren't just bots looking for a quick buck by ripping off others work.
It reinforces for me that we should all be grateful to cheetah and the fine work that that particular feline bot does.
Now off to read about an army veteran flying his flag upside down.... Oh no... Copied!!!!!
Stop the plagiarism!!!
As I wade waste deep in plagiarism and abuse every day, I think the biggest problem is that @ned and @dan have not taken an official stance on this.
It has so far been a community decision to not want copy-paste -- and actually, less than that, it is a vigilante decision. There are many users and many whales who still upvote copy-paste and do not care.
Most people just ignore cheetah and continue, only a few vigilantes downvote the copy-paste post, and even fewer upvote cheetah.
Unfortunately, as more and more plagiarized posts hit the trending page from whales who do not care, it will just perpetuate the plagiarism as people realize how much easier it is to make money this way.
It's a serious problem that is building and building, and I have no idea how to stop it.
It does seem to be getting worse and you being at the coalface obviously see this. I have noticed that it is often the good ones which are copied obviously the reason they seem good half the time.
The whole community, well the genuine part are behind your efforts. I hope we can turn it make a difference to the tide
Yep, cheetah is a little bit awesome. I use to love seeing @wang everywhere (seriously, to anyone new/not familiar with the work of wang, I'm talking about the million dollar greeting bot, that was recently taken offline), anway, yeah, cheetahs awesome!
I hope Cheetah is looking at Steemit itself as well as the outer WWW
It is much less common, but I have caught cases of steemit blogs being copy-pasted.
I remember my greeting from Wang! It was cool. Always the first to post. When I joined it made me feel quite welcome!!
I bet you stole this post
Cheetah is gonna get me ;0)
you better run
I started googling headers/sentence fragments (in quotes) before upvoting after finding out that I'd accidentally upvoted someone's cut-and-paste job.
That's quite a good move! I think that's essentially what cheetah does.
thankful Cheetah bot is on the ball as well - agree with it being timewasting when you see an interesting article only to find out the person posing it as their's has copyied ......
It drives me nuts. Especially if it is a relatively long read!!
Some of them aren't looking further than Steemit for their shitey copy-cat posts. I created a new series, Swag Sunday which aggregates all of the contests on Steemit. Within 2 hours someone had rehashed my whole post into their own version. The next day, someone else did. Shit is FUCKED UP, and the worst part is, people are afraid to flag because of the threat of retaliation.
That's terrible! Maybe there should be a contest for hunting the most plagiarists!
Fecking hell. I follow you and love swag Sunday!! I didn't realise someone has stolen it as their own. That's awful
Honestly I think some work should be copied over. But it should be rewritten atleast.
Got enough content spinners to track down, don't encourage them!
Seriously though, How long does it take to write your own thoughts and opinions and post a link? Too many people have seen that copy/paste and plagerism posts have made money. There are more popping up everyday. I find at least 10 new accounts everyday doing this. One user has over 30 accounts they use, now they are trying to avoid Cheetah by doing content spinning or a rewrite. Rewrite meaning just mixing up a few words.
It is shocking. I have come across quite a few articles that seem to be doing some kind of translated attempt at covering up their forgedness. They always come across really badly as the tense keeps shifting every few words. Hopefully more people will flag and alert where they see it. I intend too
30 accounts, that is wild!
I mean from the www into steemit of course.
Also unless there is google like power behind the cheetah bot there is absolutely no way to make sure that people do not copy. I suppose it tries a google search for some sentences and tries to find copied content that way, but what if the person trying to copy get's his information before it get's listen on google? What if he copies it from a source that isn't trackable to some online book or website url.
It's unavoidable that content will be brought in from the outer www.
straight up copied content
There is no stopping it. You cannot police it away.
Every single social media site on the internet encourages its users to share interesting content, people will do the same thing here.
What steemit needs to do is embrace it and encourage it like they do with youtube videos. Make it easier to embed the content than it is to copy it, and this place will explode with cool content.
There is an open source project called oembed that is designed to share content ethically, by embedding the content and providing a link to the author. It has gone mainstream now, there is even an enterprise level service based on it called embed.ly that provides the service for a monthly fee. I wrote up a more detailed description here:
A solution to copied content that would make steemit explode with cool posts