Plagiarism is unethical for several reasons. It is unethical because it is a form of theft. By taking the ideas and words of others and pretending they are your own, you are stealing someone else's intellectual property. It's also unethical because the plagiariser subsequently benefits from this theft in different ways. They can earn direct rewards from the content they have plagiarized and they grow their audience and increase the chances of being rewarded in the future as well over time.
It's unethical and it's theft, and even though we have a bunch of awesome users and initiatives out there doing what they can to prevent plagiarism and scammers, you can still stumble upon them from time to time.. I saw one in my previous post, which is the reason I make this one.
I simply want to highlight the consequences of being a thief, especially when I actually have the power to do something about it. I can fight back and I can stop it.
I have been vocal about the importance of engagement lately and I have seen increased engagement level on my posts recently as well. That simply means more comments.
While this is awesome and something I truly strive for, as my long haul goal is to boost the overall engagement on Hive by setting a new standard together with several awesome content creators, it brings bad things as well. The plagiarists.
Zero effort is needed to be a plagiarist and there's actually a good chance of making money through all the wonderful upvotes you get for creating content or making comments. You can clearly see that I upvoted the comment. I replied to it as well..
I noticed something 'fishy' though, so I looked through the comments on my article just for a few seconds extra, a second time. That's when I noticed this:
The same user, alex1407 comes back with another comment. I don't mind people coming back, and like I said, I want to boost the overall engagement so another comment doesn't hurt at all.
However, I remembered that I had already replied to a comment made by "alex1407" previously and I had also replied to this exact comment as well, so I knew that something was going on.
I have obviously changed my vote to a fat 0, even though it wasn't much to begin with.. I don't care about the actual amount. I care about the behaviour. This user tried to benefit and be rewarded by using another person's work..
I don't care if this person is not native in English and can't write meaningful comments in English or if this person is just a wanker without morale. I don't mind handing out upvotes and reward people for their efforts. I don't care about grammar mistakes and all that shit. I'm not native in English either, but I would never reward someone when I can clearly see at first glance that the user is trying to scam me or others around me..
Also, I don't really want to give people any ideas here, but why on earth would you copy a comment and also include the tag of one of the largest, most active stakeholders..?
Instead of earning something, this user just got 0 and I won't reward any of the "efforts" again.
