AskLeo - Is Gray Plagiarism Worth Curating?

in LeoFinance3 years ago

Yesterday I had a post about plagiarism on Leofinance and how a user was earning content creation rewards with stolen material. I don't like that because I don't find Leofinance as the place to be trashed that way. I wouldn't do that even if I get back to Steem. It's about morals.

The man seems to have stopped doing what he's done and he has even found a curator for his new types of posts which in my opinion are poor... in everything. I'm not the one to decide any standards or quality norms in here, but I want to address another topic.

Gray Plagiarism. This is a sort of a plagiarism where one author is not simply stealing anyone's work and presenting it as if it was his own, but rewrites it. You can do that with news articles, with all sort of blog posts and even youtube videos.

plagiarism-checkers-in-conjuntion-with-lmss.jpg
image source

I've seen plenty of such cases during the time I joined the blockchain as a content creator, that being at the beginning of 2018, and I bet we still have such users on Hive. I don't want to become a witch hunter on Hive, I'll let @badbitch doing that :), but I can't stop thinkin of how rewards pools can be used for curating such content.

I don't fit in the curators category because I don't have enough VP to make any sense in that regard on this chain, but some do, and it's such a pity to waste your curation on crap when you can reward decent content, users that are putting efforts and try to make a difference, that are generating authentic traffic on this platform and earn a buck or two.

It's a bit harder to spot gray plagiarism because you need to have previously read the news, or article that has become the victim of gray plagiarism, but not impossible. Hence it can easily pass as original content and it can get curated. How do you feel about curating such content though?

If you would at some point realize that one user that you keep on curating is indulging in such content creation, would you still curate his posts?

Thanks for attention,
Adrian

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While I think you have good points, I think it's very difficult some times.

I mean, I bet that most people on a niche oriented platform or community is using other content in some ways to produce content. Leofinance for instance is for finance & crypto related content.

There's only so much you can do with "BTC reaching new ATH's", so it all comes down to some level of "plagiarism" if we look deep enough with gray plagiarism-mindset.

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i totally agree with this and in a way we are all doing that. There is a phrase for that in Greek, "there is no parthenogenesis", i don't know if it has reached other countries as well. It basically means that mostly everything that we say today, someone else told so before us or build the base around it.

So whatever we write or say somebody else most likely has done that already. The only thing we can do, when writing the news as well is to simply ut a paragraph or more regarding our own opinions. Aside from that, it's natural to say something with different words.

what we can do is simply not supporting the people that rewrite a news articles without a personal touch.

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Gray plagiarism is not that.

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I totally understand where you're pointing to. I couldn't do anything about the after curation that account has been getting. I really don't know the reason the curator feels it deserves to be rewarded, well that's not in my watch anymore, unless the account decides to resume plagiarism. But for now, I'll leave it for the big boys to decide.

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The curator simply doesn't care imo

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It depends on how much of the "original" is used. Is the article simply spun. Which was popular in the article marketing days. Or is the article more used as an idea which then sparks the person to research more and write up their own opinions and research on the matter?

What about spun?

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spun I think deserves a downvote. The effort involved in spinning an article is the equivalent of a spammer in my opinion but it can be difficult to detect

Potentially, one could argue that grey plagiarism still shows proof of brain. Whereas plagiarism shows lack of brain. There is some effort in grey plagiarism, which could be rewarded. However, it would be better to provide links to the source material.

That's no proof of brain

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Not a great brain, at least.

Nope...

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There are few truly novel ideas presented on Leofinance, Hive, or even the media.

If we look at the articles on the crypto "news" sites, many of them are the same. A topic shows up on one and then another, rewritten by the author. If someone takes an article from Cointelegraph and creates a post about it, using his or her insight, then I think we have "original" content.

Where is the line? I dont know. Obviously something that just copies paragraphs, even using the ">" to highlight them, with a few lines added would not be worth much. In this instance, the writer is just looking to get some rewards for very little effort.

Like anything with gray areas, it is gray.

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If someone takes an article from Cointelegraph and creates a post about it, using his or her insight, then I think we have "original" content.

That's whole different from what I was pointing at. Spun is something else and that's what I was bringing for discussion.

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You see a lot of poorly created content getting upvoted to 2 figures through all the chains. Its a pity. Curation trails have to be careful with content like that.

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I am not a fan of curation trails and auto votes. I believe in organic curation.

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I try to do as much manually as possible

I only curate manually.

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I have less problem with what you describe if someone actually improves on original text, like correcting grammar or typos, adding proper links. It happens rarely, though.

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