A couple days ago I wrote a post on how the repetition of generic content is of little value which was based on a fair bit of experience and observation on Hive. However, it was "inspired" by an article and conversation I had seen in trending.
There is one good thing about getting into Trending, and it isn't the rewards. While one or two times there doesn't bring a lot of attention, but attention isn't always a positive thing for a "content creator" - if they aren't actually creating their own content. It is even worse they have portrayed themselves as full-time bloggers, yet aren't actually the ones writing the blog.
Hitting trending a few times is great for the rewards, getting there consistently brings curious eyes that will look far deeper than the content itself. So when the content is common, it gets noted and when comments aren't answered, it gets noted.
The other day I brought this up with on one post where I said that considering the couple hundred dollars consistently on their contentm they should answer comment and that searching the title brought up many similar articles. Not long after, it received a large downvote from a curation account, which was likely to trim the rewards based on the same observations. It was only then that the comments started to get answered, but there was a problem, the language used in the comments section and that of the post were fundamentally different.
So, this gets brought up too by me and others who noticed the same and I asked who was writing or editing the posts and as it turns out, that very-well-rewarded account was paying people on Upwork to write the blogs for them. Not only that, they were not proof-reading the content and checking it before uploading, which means that the post was indeed like others, in fact it was 63% plagiarized.
Those that have been around here for a while and actually pay attention, have seen this kind of behavior many times before and pretty much every time, the excuses as to why it was done come thick and fast. But, hitting Trending often and staying there, while no guarantee, essentially means that those people posting have run the gauntlet and come out the other side - it is a "trial by fire" and those lacking, like the account mentioned, are going to get burned.
I was just talking with a couple friends who are often up there over the years and asked, what would happen if one of our accounts was caught plagiarizing or paying some randoms off the internet to write our content. Just imagine if it came out that it wasn't me writing the 4800 posts I have added to this blockchain so far and all the times I was talking about "my consistency" I was just consistently paying instead - would you feel cheated?
Hell yes!
You would call bullshit on that and while there is very little that could be done about the Hive I have already extracted and hold in my wallet, it would be very unlikely that I would earn any more in the future. And rightly so, because I am not a noob, I am an old account that knows better, invalidating any excuses.
Just imagine, since currently I am a bit of an invalid myself - I said some thing like "I paid people to write my posts so there were better than I could do my myself, as I am busy, have two jobs including my own business, raise a young daughter, have chronic stomach issues that require treatment, am renovating a house and three months ago had a stroke that heavily affects my mental and some physical capabilities".
All of that is true - but are they good excuses to justify paying people to write my blog and calling it my own?
Fuck no.
It is my blog and I own it, which means that I am solely responsible for the content that I put there, unless I have lost my keys. This means that if I plagiarize, I do so with full responsibility, my keys, my account, my stolen content. I am very aware of this and drive for ownership of experience, which means taking responsibility and paying the consequences of what I have added to my stream of content.
Don't shit in the stream.
Not only because it affects everything downstream to come and destroys reputation on the platform, but because it also taints everything upstream too, all of the work that came before it. No matter how good, original or useful it was - I become a shitposter, and it dates back.
While the "number" reputation system on Hive is broken and is not a great indicator of actual reputation, it doesn't mean that reputation itself isn't important on the platform, it just means that it is not counted by the blockchain well. I would expect that when it comes to content reputation, I am not only the highest by the blockchain count, but also rank pretty highly on the social count too, along with several others.
This doesn't stop taking flags, in fact, it likely comes with more flags than most. As regardless of the content originality, usefulness or technical quality - gaining attention doesn't mean the attention is all positive.
It is about building trust though, which takes years of work, yet people seem willing to throw their away for a few extra dollars worth of HIVE, by deceiving the audience. Yes, the audience was deceived as they were under the impression that the content was firstly original and secondly, from the account. This is implied by the rules of "my keys, my account" which assume that the account owner has control of their own account and therefore, takes responsibility for it.
A newish account could make many mistakes in this area, as they might not know the sentiment of the Hive community. But for an old account, there is no excuse to not understand these things, especially if they purport to be full-time bloggers.
It is disappointing to say the least.
I wish that more people would learn to be creative and not post generic content that can be found everywhere, but it is unforgivable when that content isn't even written by the blogger themselves, it is paid for and plagiarized.
The irony is, they were cheated too!
They paid someone in order to cheat the Hive community into paying for content they thought was original. And they were cheated by paying for content that that was meant to be original, but was actually plagiarized. The level of incompetence shines bright.
I completely understand that there is a lot of pressure on people in their lives to earn and socially perform, but there still has to be some level of personal ethics involved, doesn't there?
For me personally, I imagine I would feel pretty damn shitty if I was posting other people's content and saying it was my own, regardless of how much I was earning. I would feel the internal turmoil and conflict of knowingly saying one thing and doing another and likely constantly fear being caught out for my behavior.
I remember when I used to play Ghost Recon back in the day and there was a guy in the clan I played with, who was really good at the game, often saving our team in online matches. The European members got together for a weekend of LAN gaming and they were surprised at how bad the guy was, but put it down to his surprisingly heavy drinking. However, as you already have assumed, the guy was actually wallhacking and aim-botting when in the privacy of his own home.
Fucking pathetic.
The saying is that, "cheaters never prosper" but that is unfortunately not true. They often prosper, it is just that we have no visibility on all the cheats that don't get caught and in the world we have created, there is very little economic visibility anyway. However on Hive, we do have visibility on what is added to the blockchain, which also means there is accountability and consequences of action too.
As disappointed as I may be when these things happen, I would far rather have it discovered and in the open, than not. It isn't to punish the person directly, but we do learn from examples - even the bad ones. I would far rather people follow good example, but good example generally comes through a lot of good work performed consistently. Ain't nobody got the time for that apparently - so many pay to cut corners instead.
Reputations aren't based on what you think about yourself.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]