Last week I said I was going to scam Steemit by posting plagiarized content on purpose. Couple of days ago, I did so; I am glad to report that it was caught!

The sharp-eyed Hive account@symbot successfully identified this post as lifted from a Vice article that had been making the social media rounds lately. As I promised in the original post, I'll be donating any proceeds made by the plagiarized post to them. Yeah it's just a whole 0.025 Steem Dollars, but as far as I'm concerned, they earned it.

Initial Reactions

I found it difficult to source an article for plagiarism. I needed to find something that would be easily rewritten, but not so obscure that no one would have a chance of finding out the deception. The Vice article seemed a good choice because I had seen it on Facebook; deciding to rewrite it (and to substitute images sourced independently from the ones used in the article) seemed like a good compromise.

Once the post was live and I had finished promoting it on Steemit.Chat, I was kind of disappointed that I was found out so soon and that the plagiarized post just died on the operating table. Of course, I did leave a few hints to make it easier, like using #plagiarism as one of the five tags and linking to the original post at the very end of the article. After thinking about it a little though, I changed my mind; upon reflection, I'm relieved the post didn't generate more upvotes, as it means that the plagiarized content didn't generate enough traction to earn any real rewards.

Several things contributed to this; first, Hive account@symbot called it out early as plagiarism. Additionally, the post was on a subject that wasn't tagged as one of the popular, trending topics, which also prevented it from wide exposure. This bodes well for stolen content that falls through the cracks, and it also shows that the community is working as intended when it comes to self-policing content.

So what can we take away from this experiment?

First, I wasn't caught by the many anti-plagiarism bots out there like Hive account@cheetah, as I re-wrote the original article in my own words, providing enough originality to get past any automatic detection methods. This exposes an inherent flaw in bot detection methods; it will weed out anyone who tries to pull off a copy-paste job - of which there certainly is quite a lot of - but anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together can find a way around this limitation.

Second, it's obvious that even when someone tries to plagiarize content in a way that will get around our automated first line of defense, the rest of the Steemit community is ready to point it out and tag it as such. Hive account@symbot not only figured out that the content was bogus but they also took action, and it's this kind of proactive approach to policing content manually that will act as a successful backup to auto-detection by our bot army.

Finally, even in the event that a post isn't identified as plagiarism doesn't mean that it's going to garner huge rewards. If it's on an esoteric or unpopular subject, or if it's tagged with something that doesn't get a lot of traffic, it's not going to generate much in the way of interest anyway. This means that it's likely the majority of plagiarized content will, even if it goes unidentified, simply languish and be overlooked for being garbage content. While this isn't as big a deterrent as being caught and flagged into negative reputation oblivion, if a plagiarist notices that the stolen content they're reposting isn't generating any attention at all, positive or negative, they're likely to just stop trying and go back to shitposting on 4chan.

Conclusions

The system works. Steemit rewards original content, especially when it has value to community members. Stolen, plagiarized content is either ignored or called out for being stolen early and often. Even in the event that something slips through the cracks and does end up generating large amounts of rewards, it's been proven, consistently, that once a scam is exposed, the community will remove their upvotes and flag a post - and a poster, thanks to the new reputation system - into oblivion.

The end results are the same: plagiarists do not profit from Steemit - or if they do, not for long.