Want to Avoid Being Blacklisted? A Personal Testimonial about Why Failing to Source Might be a Really Bad Idea

in Natural Medicine4 years ago

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Here at Natural Medicine, we try to encourage people to use original content. Like most of HIVE, we believe that it's fraudulent to do otherwise, and particularly unfair - why should you be rewarded with HIVE for something that isn't yours? It's also unfair for the original author, because you are profiting from their work.

We have written quite a few posts warning about it. If you aren't aware, read the following post, which we wrote recently. We also clearly state it in our community, and we clearly state it in our Discord.

Don't Want to Be Blacklisted and Lose Your Reputation and Potential Post Rewards? Then Read This Post

Sometimes, people get busy, and forget to source. We are human. And there are grey areas too - such as posting your own content you've posted elsewhere, or your own Youtube content without authenticating your account. If it doubt, pop into our Discord and ask us.

Some users sometimes use content and simply forget to source, even though they don't mean to do it. This happened to one of our own curators last week. The following testament explains her embarrassment and upset when she was caught using PLR content - something I had never heard about - on HIVE.

WHAT'S PLR?!

PLR is an acronym for Private Label Rights - basically content content you legally can edit, change or modify it. You can buy it online, and it's often used by content curators to fill out their blogs.

Natural Medicine would prefer original content and this INCLUDES PLR, even if it's your right to use it. If you must use it, please source it adequately.

Because if you don't, Hivewatchers WILL find you - as the following testimonial from @porters attests. She has been very brave coming forward to publicly explain what happened - something that cpuld happen to anyone.

Please dont let that person be you.

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The following testimonial is from @porters, a loved and trusted curator on HIVE. We are more than proud of her for standing up to write this for other Hivers to learn from, and appreciate her efforts to do so!

Thinking of using Private Label Rights (PLR) content on your Hive blog? Think again. You may have the right to publish it without attribution but so do other folks and it may already be published on the web. Hivewatcher will pick up duplicate content and flag you as plagiarizing and a fraud because what you posted was not original content and was not sourced.

Even if you were to use just a small portion of a PLR article in your post, if it is directly copied they will pick it up. I know, I had used one small paragraph in an otherwise original content post and @hivewatcher slammed a fraud plagiarized comment on it, Hivewatcher then sourced where it had previously been published and marked it as fraudulent giving a direction:

“If you believe this comment is in error, please contact us in #appeals in Discord.”

I never noticed this comment on the post with one small paragraph of PLR content in it before I had published my next post where I shared a list of tips from a PLR article I had. Wham! The Hivewatcher comment came:

“Plagiarism is the copying & pasting of others work without giving credit to the original author or artist. Plagiarized posts are considered fraud and violate the intellectual property rights of the original creator. Fraud is discouraged by the community and may result in the account being Blacklisted.”

And they did blacklist me! I was put on the Spaminator blacklist with their orange question mark placed beside my Hive account profile name which when clicked on showed:

“Included in the following blacklists: spaminator (more details).
spaminator: Users on this list have been identified by @spaminator and @mack-bot doing one of the following: spamming, post farming, comment farming or otherwise engaged in exploitative behavior. Provided by @spaminator, for more details go here: discord.gg/7FkETjJ”

I couldn’t believe it! I had been writing loads of original content consistently on Steemit and then on Hive for the past two years and these two blog posts containing parts of PLR articles I owned had got me blacklisted as a spammer!

I did appeal the blacklisting stating:

“My account was put on the spaminator blacklist . The posts that received the comments from Hivewatcher stating it was fraud or plagiarism contained content from Private Label Rights (PLR) articles that I owned. PLR gives you the right to publish that content without attribution which I thought I could use to add to my posts on Hive. I was corrected in the #queries channel that PLR is considered "fraud directed at Hive community. Hive pays you to write original content so curators were deceived to think that you have written it. as you have never stated in the title that of post that it is PLR article"

I did go back and state in my post that I got the tips from a PLR article I had and at the end gave my appreciation to the person who created the original content and made it PLR. What is necessary to get my account removed from your blacklist?”

I also in the Hivewatcher query channel had explained what I had done in the posts where I received the Hivewatcher comments of fraud and plagiarism:

“I was given a comment on my post saying it was a fraud and plagiarized . In that post I incorporated some tips that I had rights to along with adding how they were useful to me in my life. It seems that the person listed as the source used the whole PLR article (which I had rights too also) without changing or adding to it. Is it not allowed to use parts of PLR articles to add to your post? I did edit it to say where I got the tips from.”

Their reply waswhat I stated in the spaminator-appeal which I will repeat again for you below:

Hivewatchers-Helper: “Either way it is fraud directed at Hive community. Hive pays you to write original content so curators were deceived to think that you have written it. as you have never stated in the title that of post that it is PLR article”
My reply: “My mistake - I can go edit it to say the tips are from a plr article I have. How else can I continue forward and correct it?”

After a couple of days being blacklisted and the rewards from my two posts removed I got this response in the spaminator-appeal channel:

“I deactivated the blacklist. In future posts, please write in the title "Parts of post is copied from Private Label Rights (PLR) articles" Then exactly mark in post which parts are copied just if you were quoting, please.”

Will I be using PLR content in my posts moving forward? I think not! This caused me a tremendous amount of stress that I could have done without! I hope this article will save others from having to go through what I did and you will think long and hard before using PLR content or if you do follow the instructions I was given by Spaminator about listing it in your title and putting it in quotes.

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Thanks @porters for being brave enough to write about what happened to you. I'm sure there's people on HIVE that will feel really grateful to have this information! It's quite disheartending and embarrassing to be put on a blacklist, and that mark can really affect what people think of you and whether they upvote you. Repeat transgressions can mean you NEVER remove that mark from your profile - so let Porters story be a good lesson for you!


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I'm grateful to @hivewatchers for this one, I must say. I had never heard of PLR for text. I appreciate @porters has a huge heart and has been curating and giving out for eons on Hive, but there is no way that buying generic content & using it for creating what should be original content has ANY place on Hive, under any circumstances. Honestly, it has no place on ANY blog.

Yes, it take time and imagination to create good Hive content, and that's what Hive is rewarding.

Appreciate your courage @porters, and am grateful for your willingness to redress and fix this publicly. The transparency of the blockchain can be harsh, but it's integral to a new society where we're able and allowed to fuck up and be embraced. This post is a great role model for new Hivers, and an important thing to have happened.

Sorry it feels like crap tho. Hugs.

 4 years ago  

It was a hard lesson but it can be those hard lessons that sink in most! I feel better knowing I'll not be taking the easy way for putting content up and it now allows me to just focus on expressing my own thoughts, knowledge gained, etc.which will be much more rewarding to me in the long run!
Hug gratefully received!

Thanks for sharing this! These are really informative. Glad @porters got the blacklist removed, I can only imagine the stres going through the process. 😵

Thanks for sharing this experience. This is one thing I do highly disagree with is the whole @hivewatcher account in the first place. I get the wanting to keep things original, but isn’t this platform supposed to be censorship free? I think blacklisting goes completely against what Hive is all about. But that’s my opinion. Isn’t that kind of thing is what downvoting is for? PLR content is owned for use however we want and should be able to post it anywhere. If we change it into our own words, it’s shouldn’t be an issue. I think it is just whales on a power trip.

I agree - there's certainly an issue there, and something that needs addressing. I can see WHY they're trying to make sure people don't plagiarise, because it's not fair to get rewarded for other people's content. However, it can certainly be seen as quite heavy handed when a kind warning will do. At least there's a little lesson learnt about originality - whilst censorship free is one thing, being seen to profit off the work of others, whether it's intentional or not, is kinda tricky too, no? Balance in all things, as usual.

As for downvotes - we just recieved a huge downvote on this one, so go figure. Sometimes downvotes are just power tripping too.

I agree to an extent. The thing with PLR content is you pay for the rights to use the content, so technically it is your content. If you don’t hold the license or rights, yes it is plagiarism, but not when you own the rights to use the content as it is yours and how you wish, just saying. And again, just my opinion. I feel that if you are to use PLR content, then you should rewrite it in your own words and nobody should have a problem with it.

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Do not miss the last post from @hivebuzz:

The Customization Guide for the HiveBuzz store

I work hard to source all information I get from somewhere else in my posts. I do not use many articles and such because I never want there to be a misunderstanding like happened here.

All the photos I use are taken by me and if I use a Gif or a meme I always put where I got it from below that Gif or meme. I post mostly about things that are happening in or about my life. Sometimes I post about how I feel about certain subjects and those are my feelings about that certain subject.

@hivewatchers does a good just but like all of us they are only human and mistakes do happen.