My War With Spam And Plagiarism
I have already lost one home, and one of the catalysts was a massive attack initiated by spammers and plagiarists. I will never let Hive become overrun by them if I can help it!
I have seen a lot of discussion about the topic lately. It's sort of a sore spot for me, so I'm finding it impossible to keep my thoughts to myself. It's just me expressing my views and sharing my experience though. If the first blogging site I had settled into hadn't been attacked by spam, maybe it would be alive and thriving today. Or maybe not, who truly knows how things might have been?
This post is not meant to offend anyone, but unfortunately might be offensive to all as far as I know. If you want to earn by either activity, you are certainly going to be offended.
I'm just a New Bee, and can only read so much in a day, and certainly don't know the off chain details. So please don't feel like I am taking any side of the current issues, except for the one that defends Hive itself. I will quite proudly take the side of Hive!
However for me looking in from the outside it was very upsetting to see the hard feelings and arguments among some respected Bees. The potential loss of a community leader is a tragedy for Hive. It was also upsetting to see a spammer refused help when seeking it out.
Back to my war... It all started on another platform which was centralized. The servers have been wiped long ago. All unsaved posts are long dead. But I will tell you about it anyway, because it drove home the importance of keeping spam and plagiarism at bay.
It all started when we saw a huge influx of Wikipedia style posts, along with an equal amount of googled pictures of flowers. Those usually contained the literary masterpiece of "I love flowers. Flowers are beautiful." or something equally thought provoking.
The war was eventually won, and I am proud to say that I got to take part, as a Warrior. @kenechukwu97 and Pat Jules and many others were in this fellowship. I have happy memories of this time, and we found and helped establish newbies because of this too. Spammers who didn't know how to do it the right way but wanted to. And talented writers struggling to be seen.
But as I said, it was a catalyst. In the end, the offenders and how to deal with them was one of many things that caused problems among the official staff team, which I never joined. I was perfectly happy as a member.
My personal preference for dealing with the offenders is to first leave a polite message saying what is wrong with the post. I also offer help if they would like to chat in private.
Maybe one in a hundred will reply and put in the effort. The rest keep on posting garbage. This gets faithfully downvoted until they either leave or express an interest in changing.
Any sincere effort at improvement is encouraged with an upvote. Yes, the old carrot and stick method! Contact and requests for help are rewarded with polite and friendly help. If unable to put in the time for whatever reason, I send them to a willing volunteer.
This tends to weed most of the hardcore offenders out quickly and efficiently. Those who hang on do change when they see it's the only way to get what they want. Many realize that they love writing or art, and become incredible members.
I'm just sharing what I have seen work, and hoping that we can find a way to encourage everyone to do their best with each post.
Isn't it better if a spammer stays in his or her original account, and gets support to improve? In my experience if they are pushed out, they usually come back in a new account, with the same bad habits. This just keeps happening until they eventually give up.
This is a 100% power up post
Cover image is from Canva, using their gallery
Warrior badge made by Jharvis for UU
Electronic-terrorism, voice to skull and neuro monitoring on Hive and Steem. You can ignore this, but your going to wish you didnt soon. This is happening whether you believe it or not. https://ecency.com/fyrstikken/@fairandbalanced/i-am-the-only-motherfucker-on-the-internet-pointing-to-a-direct-source-for-voice-to-skull-electronic-terrorism
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I remembered this tradegy and even me was part of the course, this is the most toughest battle so far and it's so unfortunate that we lost our platform because of this.
Plagiarism is a disease and we won't allow that here in hive.
Very true, we will fight to make Hive the home we always dreamed of ♥️
!PIZZA
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Thanks 😊.....for the pizza!!!
Thanks for sharing and putting it out there. Regretfully I am sure there will be those that will give you shit, just don't let it bother you.
I like the approach you described, sounds somewhat reasonable.
Either way, I am just going to keep my head down and create content and curate when I can. I will give credit when it is appropriate and hope some ass hat doesn't decide I have committed some arbitrary offense along the way and downvote me to oblivion.
As long as we are respectful, I don't think there's a problem with sharing opinions. Thanks so much for your support :)
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Interesting take, and thanks for sharing your experiences. Carrot and stick is pretty solid, the nuance lies in the execution of it. I wrote a lengthy tale that touches on Hive's execution of it. :) 🙏
The thing is we can't forget the carrots. Without incentive and positive reinforcement, you'll never get the best results.
!PIZZA
I whole-heartedly agree. :) 🙏
The thing about spammers and spamming is that they know that they are shitting the bed, but they are just too lazy and irresponsible to right their wrongs. And it's appalling.
The Uptrennd we knew held a lot of things together and made us to feel a strong connection despite being people that started out on this journey in a somewhat faceless forum.
We've already seen the effect of spamming. It's not a good one.
Exactly. We had some who stopped, and others who thought generic posts were real blogs. But 99 out of 100 of them were just stealing from those who were writing great content.
That's why we need both carrots and sticks. Sticks for prodding, carrots for the one in a hundred. Because we have all seen the difference that one can make :)
!PIZZA
Hola!! The king himself. Been A long while. I see you are kinging here and i trust your skills and eagerness to deal with spammers anytime any day!
Loll... Boss.
Where have you been hiding? 😂
Welcome back to the virtual world oooo. This is fabulous
Reading this post got me kinda moody, because it reminded me of the good old days we had in UU. Showing Up for battles against spammers was an event i couldn't afford to miss. But then I'm consoled with the fact that I'm meeting you all here, and knowing that the family bond lives on forever.
I have never actually looked at this from this perspective, but i think you have an awesome point here. Guiding and being willing to direct spammers might actually help to change their mindset, but then this can only work if the spammer is actually ready and willing to learn.
Believe me, some spammers enjoy spamming and harden their hearts to any correction
The hardcore spammers are the reason we need to be ready for war - we aren't at war with the uninformed and the ones who might try it once, be punished, and reform. The latter are fairly easy to guide.
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I have seen at least five sites bite the dust due to spammers in the last three years.
The last two almost took any faith I had on online work.
Yet, here I am.
we have fought those wars and thought we've won only to discover we lost it all.
It annoys me to see the same kind here, nice picture, nice writing types.
I am firm with them. I won't take any more of this bull crap.
Yes, our Captain has taught us well 💓We have to protect our home
!PIZZA and !ALIVE
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Yeah, there is a lot I learned from her.. to fight spam as a community was one of them
Thanks for the pizza.
My pleasure, and yes we can't and shouldn't fight alone :)
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