Comment by chrisacky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisacky | Hacker News Reader

I have recently added thenextweb.com to my blacklist domain to make sure that I accidentally don't send them any page views. I'm indifferent about any downvotes that i'll receive as a result of this comment, but for those of you who have realised how "deserving" Zee thinks he is to plagiarise articles, here is an alternate you can read.

http://memeburn.com/2012/05/its-official-chrome-is-the-webs-...

(I'm referring to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972651 incase you missed out on how TNW's Zee just totally does not get it).

(Edit: I'm sure this article here isn't plagiarised. That's not why I provided a link. It's hardly an imaginative story so I'm sure TNW pulled it together themselves. However, when you try and pass yourself off as a legitamate hard working publication, and fail to give credit to someone who essentially wrote and researched your article, there is something intrinsically wrong with your ethics. As a person, I'm not even particularly opinionated, lots can pass me by without me caring: but Zee's attitude disgusted me).

So what we have to do is always find the original sources of thenextweb articles and post those instead.

There is certainly no loss in skipping over thenextweb.

This is just my opinion.

But in my experience they have proven themselves to be all but worthless time and again. It's not just plagiarism. They do not research their stories. They appear to lack any measurable insight into the subject matter. As such, they make a lousy source of news.

> So what we have to do is always find the original sources

That's what the guidelines recommend.

So the question becomes, why people keep posting plagiarized stories (complete with link tracking query strings) by TNW on HN?

A lot of people are probably not aware of it, as it's hard to keep up with every drama on the Internet when you have things to do. I certainly wasn't until today.

(Yes, I realize the irony of this comment, I should be doing things right now.)

Self reflection can be such an exhaustive character trait. My Objective C programs can also sing that song ;).

That's how nerds get controversial things accomplished without pushback. They do it while the rest of the world, which is busy with other things, isn't looking.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems like the kettle is calling the pot black.

"I used to scrape articles/content written by people. I created my own content management system that would publish entire websites for specific terms."

You mentioned this in a previous comment on another thread. I remember, because it was a fairly big comment, and wasn't long ago. Considering the discussion was on scrapping, I can only imagine you didn't have explicit permission to do so. Indeed, you go on to say:

"Anyway, content would be useful to me, because I would spin in into new content, using a very basic markov chain."

Indeed, the claim you have for not doing this anymore is:

"I don't do this any more since I'm actually working on what will hopefully be a very succesul startup..."

This doesn't grant TNW a free pass. I just found your attitude interesting.

I agree, you definitely make a good point and I make no defense for how I scraped content in the past. Perhaps that is the reason why I took such disgust to his behavior, because I learnt to move on from what I was doing.

But, just to stress one point in case it wasn't obvious from the scraping comment I made, I would never republish the scraped content. (I went out of my way to make this point in my previous comment because in spite of my somewhat "cloudy"/blackhat past, I would never rip off other peoples content. The cloest I would come would be from spinning new content using markov chains, however, when you have an ngram ranging between 3-7 and spread accross thousands of articles, there is surely no copyright infringement through republication of your fabricated content.

Anyway, I agree with what you said about my attitude being interesting.. but peoples attitudes change and the markov chain example was how I used to scrape somewhere near 4-8 years ago.

(Nice comment by the way, if there is anything I would hate to be, is a hypocrite, so a little self reflection is welcome on this subject!)

I figured you saw a lot of what you did in the past, and so for you, this hit a lot closer to home then you'd want to admit.

> The cloest I would come would be from spinning new content using markov chains, however, when you have an ngram ranging between 3-7 and spread accross thousands of articles, there is surely no copyright infringement through republication of your fabricated content.

I think you are lying to yourself. And, honestly, I think deep-down you know it. You seem like a reasonable guy. TNW didn't repeat word for word the article that blew up either. I'm not here to debate this. I think what you did could definitely be argued as copyright infringement. Just because you change a certain number of words doesn't mean you get a free pass.

That's not an issue, however. You realize you made a mistake, and you've moved on. And that, I think, is important. Should we forever shun TNW for mistakes in the past? Should we shun you?

> (Nice comment by the way, if there is anything I would hate to be, is a hypocrite, so a little self reflection is welcome on this subject!)

I'm glad you took it the right way. I was a bit apprehensive about bringing it up. I wanted to make a point, and discuss this. So thank you.

We all have a past. Should it haunt us forever?

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