The recent article written by @metzli has had a big impact on the Project Hope community (and hopefully on bloggers here on the platform recently). It has received 54 comments in total, which is quite extreme, considering that the average number of comments per post is somewhere between 0 and 3. If you haven't read the post yet, check it out here.
I have to admit, I love the fact that we can discuss and disagree, and still be friends! We should never be afraid of not agreeing, after all, democracy is about having space for people of all thoughts, and the ability to live next to one another in peace and joy, even though we disagree. That is even one of the keys to a solid marriage... you don't always have to agree, but you have to agree on the fact that you are allowed to disagree!
Let us get to the plagiarism subject... cross posting!
I have got to say, I enjoyed the article written by @metzli. And, I also enjoyed all the comments. I will share my experiences with cross-posting, and also my thoughts on the topic, where I in many ways agree with the author in many ways. Let's get started!
Do I own the rights to my own material?
The clear answer is yes, as long as I don't sell it to someone else. If I write a book and give the rights to the publisher, then I no longer have the rights to do whatever I want to with my content. But, when I publish it on Hive or Steem, I still own the content and I haven't sold my rights to anyone. So yes, I absolutely have the right to publish the content on both platforms, the way I see it.
Let us forget about Hive and Steem for a second...
I own lots of domains and websites. I have been working with websites that also used @steempress to publish content from websites to Steem/Hive. But, one of my great worries was that sharing my content to Steem/Hive using Steempress would actually hurt the reputation of my own domain, after all, sharing identical content to several sites/domains can have a negative effect.
To fix this, SteemPress always added a text to the article looking something like this: "This post was first published at www.youraddress.com." In that way, any search engine would (hopefully) understand that the post was first published on your original blog, and thus, they would index the original site and not be messed up seeing the same post and content on two very different sites.
If I publish a post in my original blog and decide to publish it in another blog as well, there is something called a canonical URL. This is something you add to the code when you cross-post, copy, duplicate an article to a different platform. This will cause Google (and other search engines) to see that this article was original published somewhere else, and therefore, they will index the original article (seen in the rel canonical URL in the HTML code), and not the copy published elsewhere.
So, when I use a plugin installed in my Wordpress blog to publish my Wordpress article to Medium (for example), the plugin automatically adds the rel canonical="my original URL" to the code, in order to hinder confusion for all the search engines.
Let us return to Steem/Hive and anything else
To be honest, this is not a war between Steem and Hive (only). This is about cross posting your own content in general. I recently had a movie review posted in the Netflix and Streaming community on Steemit that was first published on http://read.cash/ (a platform very similar to Steem/Hive, only using Bitcoin Cash instead). I believe you can decide freely where you publish your content (if you have the rights to do so and haven't sold it to anyone), but if you want to help the platforms you use, then it would be wise at least to add the following sentence or something like this to the article:
"This article was originally published at (add the address here)."
This will help the search engines process the content, and hopefully, avoid confusion, which again can lead to penalties and a worse SEO rating. Maybe you don't care. Well, you should! If the domains are punished, fewer people will find Steem and Hive content as they search, which will lead to fewer people reading about the platform, discovering the platform, and if fewer people use the platform, the demand for the tokens will grow smaller, which leads to a price decrease for the tokens.
This isn't a hard job, but one that I believe is needed and would be useful. But, this is not about cross-posting between Steem and Hive only. This is for everyone who decide to publish the same content on Medium, on Reddit, in their own blogs, on other platforms... If it is cross-posted, always make sure to link to the "original" location of the post.
If you want to make the job of curators really joyful, then you could also add the following line to your blog post (if it is true).
This post is an original article, written by me, and only published on this platform.
Sorry about this @crypto.piotr
Haha, my good friend... You told me to write a short comment on the article on plagiarism, and here I gave you an entire article instead... sorry my man!! :)
I am no master of this subject, but I really wanted to share my thoughts in this article, based on my experience with cross-posting from other platforms, social media platforms, and more!
Take care everyone, and happy blogging!
This article was originally published at https://steemit.com/hive-175254/@unbiasedwriter/is-cross-posting-plagiarism-is-it-good-behavior-further-thoughts
This is an original article written by me for Project Hope!