How to fight plagiarism together !
Each success of a platform may bring abusers to it. Some will try to copy-paste the work of others. Some bring content from the web claiming that belongs to them. Some even don't care and just take the whole content from the web and use it here. Of course we have people who fight the plagiarism here, but can they find all of it ? They already do their best to fight it and to downvote those who are doing that or to warn them at least. Here we don't have the option to delete content, but we have the option to hide it and make it unseen. In this post I would like to share solutions to fight such kind of abuse.
So, the first thing we should care all about is what we upvote. We think maybe that if we have a little upvote, that means we are not responsible. We all are ! Do you forget that we are on a decentralized platform ? Do you forget that you own your content here ? Do you forget that every single one here should participate in the governance somehow ? Aren't you staking your rewards and influencing the market or the reward pool ? Even the most little, tiny upvote affect that ! Maybe not in a big manner, but still. Imagine thousands of curators giving that little upvote to an abuser. Will that make the change ? Of course it will and it may even push a content to the trending page. So, don't tell me that we are not all here respensible of what we upvote ! We all do !
That's why please when you upvote something, do your best to be sure that's an original content. I feel that we have a spam attack here and the more people will join, the more strong we will have to fight the abuse on the platform. Not only in terms of plagiarism, but in terms of even governance and maybe even the concepts we are supporting. I will tell you in this post how you may fight the plagiarim, so don't tell anyone that you didn't know if someone will blame you of supporting the spam on the platform. Even big curators could be asked by the community. We are all on the same ship ! Let's care about it together !
The second thing I would ask you to do, please check the post before upvoting it. At least read a part of it. It's better to read all of it, but in our modern era we may not have that much time to do, but for the sake of the community we should read most of the post before upvoting it. Don't let the idea of curation rewards make you going crazy about rewards and upvote only content that you think will do well and authors you think will do well ! Let's please upvote the content that deserves to be upvoted.
Anyway, the second thing you may do if you are not sure that the content is original is the following :
- Use plagiarism checker online. There are a lot of them on the web and they are even free to use like : duplichecker.com
- In case using those tools you found 0% plagiarism, check if there is a similar content copy pasting the title to search engine.
- Check even the illustrations used in the post, because spamers may edit the text to hide plagiarism, but use the same pictures.
- Ask the author to share his/her other sources and try to make sure that they are the owners of the sources.
- By the way, if you see something quoted without the source, that could be also considered plagiarism, because the owners may have copy rights and we don't want to have troubles with such authors in the future !
Of course some spamers are really professional in hiding plagiarism. Maybe they've been doing that for years and earning from that everywhere, but we should do our best to catch them and stop them from doing that or at least to report them to those who will take care of that. Usually you may find a channel to report the abuse in each community or tribe discord server ! But still, unlike the centrazlied social media where only the owners of the website may do something about it, while users may only report. Here in decentralized one we are all responsible for doing something about that !
Don't forget as well that those spamers may earn from the reward pool and that's limited every single day. So, in case they will earn more, the original content will earn less and that will touch your pocket as well and it's another motivation to fight the abuse !
I prefer to find short posts that talk about author's story. The kinds of posts are unique and original.
It's no easy task to run all the checks necessary to see if something is plagiarism or not. I suspect many people simply don't bother or might not even think to check it.
Fully agree that each person should be doing their part. As a token holder you have "stake" or really you're part owner of the platform and it's in your best interest to want to make that token price go up by creating high standards but still a constructive place to learn and grow.
I don't want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else's words get inadvertently mixed in with mine. Really, to engage in Plagiarism is disappointing