I noticed
someone posting a rapid-fire succession of blog posts today and each one was quite long. I was impressed for a minute but that quickly turned to suspicion when I realized that I'd have to be Superman to type that fast, let alone think up the content and edit it. Curious, I dropped a paragraph from
one of these posts into Google and sure enough, it pointed to
another person's post from another website. Only a few words had been altered in an insufficient attempt to throw people off the scent. I repeated the test with other posts from the user and found the same sort of results... I'm wondering if there's a way to identify and filter this sort of activity without us all having to manually check content like this? Probably not a huge priority but it's something to consider when looking to upgrade the platform.
Suspicious...
quite...
Several people are looking into a plagiarism API for Steem. You can manually use this tool (and others) for now : http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
Thanks Tuck!
Cool, thanks :)
oh great! thanks. i didn't know about that.
I just tried it and it doesn't work in this case. The re-poster changed a few key words to throw it off.
If you still think it's plagiarized, it's worth downvoting.
Were they "relationship advice" posts? I saw a lot of those popping up pretty fast.
Lots of general life tips and recipes, it looks like. Yeah, several on relationships, though not nearly as good as mine. lol
I was thinking about a similar function that would tell a poster if a link was already on steemit. In case someone already curated the content that I wanted to. just to let me know.
Yeah, that would be handy. Maybe someday...
Thanks for keeping an eye out!
No problem. :)
good catch! did you flag it?
yeah
When I started out here, I took one or two of my own blog posts offline and moved them to Steem. No one was reading my old blog anyway. I was skeptical and wanted to test the waters without putting in a huge time investment. Once I saw that there was something to it, I began writing brand new posts specifically for Steemit. I may post these back to my old blog later on, since I like to keep a copy of what I've created on a system that I own. So if you find my articles on Google, it's probably just me doing that. :)
It's not plagiarism if you wrote them ;) I actually don't even believe in the concept of intellectual property but it's the dishonesty that concerns me. Copying someone else's work is one thing but lying to people about being the originator is quite another.
If you're in the slack chat and feel like helping curb abuse, there is the #steemitabuse channel.
Cool, I'll have a look.
Cut and paste a random line into Google search. Then do it with another random line. Even if they change a few words, it will come up.
Yeah, that's what I did. You can drop a whole paragraph in there and it should find the source material.
People should be rewarded for flagging plagiarized content. If there is a strong reward system built in, things like this won't have a chance.
Yeah, but then people would paste things just to be rewarded for flagging them. lol I'm sure there must be a way to do it. So many interesting little challenges with this stuff.
@piedpiper Unfortunately, there will be a lot of people looking to make a fast buck out of this system. As the platform grows this issue is likely to compound.
^True story :-/
I could imagine making a downvote bot for this kind of thing, but you'd want to make darn sure it didn't have many (any?) false positives.
I think @pharesim made one.