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Comment by uaemar | Hacker News Reader

88 pointsuaemar48 comments

This Substack appears to be stolen - by re-creating a Substack hostname that the original author has deleted, then re-publishing the articles with back-dated dates.

This Substack plagiarism scammer is getting even more creative.

They appear to have found an old Substack that was deleted in 2022-2023 (https://web.archive.org/web/20220826223418/https://michaelde...), then registered the deleted Substack hostname (with their own Substack profile), gone through Internet Archive or another source, and re-published the posts with back-dated dates.

OP, what say ye? Am I wrong?

Substack, how is this possible?

Here's the back story on this ongoing plagiarism campaign, including plenty of other examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164077

Dan, how about changing the title and URL on this submission, so it's about the plagiarism and not linking to the (stolen/impersonated) content?

If you want to link to the real submission, it's available on Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20220611064229/https://michaeldeh...), though that may send more traffic to the plagiarizer.

Direct link to original archived copy of this article for those who want to avoid page views on the OP post:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220611064229/https://michaelde...

This is pretty insane.

Here's the plagiarizer's new Substack profile: https://substack.com/@michaeldehaan - the profile was created 2024-04-26. That's not the actual author, it's someone stealing Michael's content under their own name.

For now, please be suspicious of Substack-hosted content - here or elsewhere - from anyone without obvious reputation. Obviously stealing old Substack hostnames and posting otherwise-identical content on the orignal URLs is now a thing. Their URLs are not as stable/consistent as we all (reasonably!) assume.

Substack, if you allow old hostnames to be re-used, how about removing the ability to use the same URL slug? Or at least removing the ability to back-date posts? It's probably worth looking for old URLs (ie, hostname+page slug) that have been re-published by different Substack accounts, too - obviously this flaw is being exploited.

Plagiarizer, you're obviously active on HN. Can you share more about why you're doing this? Boredom? Substack monetization grift?

Update: the Substack profile and blog have been deleted, either by the plagiarizer/scammer who saw these comments or by Substack. The article itself is still online (even though the index page and profile are gone), though I assume it will be deleted soon.

Here's what the fake Substack looked like in the time it was online (roughly 2024-04-26):

http://web.archive.org/web/20240426123303/https://michaeldeh...

It had 10+ posts written by the real author, re-created under the original title, URL slug, publication date, and byline. The only difference was that the actual Substack owner was a scammer, not the author.

As mentioned elsewhere, this is essentially undetectable by regular people. The only fix is for Substack to prevent it from happening at all.

http://web.archive.org/web/20240426130030/https://michaeldeh... has a preview of the index page, though it doesn't list the other blog posts that were re-published.

I'm confused as to how we can tell.

Where do you see "the profile was created 2024-04-26"? Is the instagram linked on the profile also faked or is that the real guy?

How do we know it was deleted back in 2022? Because there's a single web archive snapshot where the page shows as "Not Found" in that year? That could happen for other reasons. The guy could also be re-instating his own substack.

I'm not doubting this but want to know how to detect it. If the instagram is the real guy someone should tell him lol.

Profile creation date is in the profile metadata. View source on https://substack.com/@michaeldehaan and find for: profile_set_up_at

The Instagram link is not the real author, it's just some random person with the same name.

I'd rather not share more about this person's pattern, but I've sent it to Dan and Substack. If you look closely at the links I pasted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164077 (and profiles), you'll spot most of it. I'm sure they'll get better next time, though.

This is all but impossible to detect unless there's some pattern/tell. That's why I say to be somewhat skeptical of Substack URLs for now, unless you know the person giving it to you (or are otherwise sure the blog wasn't deleted). The real solution is for Substack to not allow people to re-publish on URLs already used by other accounts, so you and I don't need to try to figure this out on a case-by-case basis - in general, that's not possible.

One can report the profile for impersonation.

I did that. "Impersonation" is usually posting something with someone else's name, though. This is way past that, though - Substack that allows people to reuse hostnames + URL slugs, and put back-dated posts on them, so the entire original URL is impersonated.

I also just emailed Substack's security alias.

> I did that. "Impersonation" is usually posting something with someone else's name, though.

Impersonation is when you pretend to be someone else.

holy meta !

This is timely. My wife called me out for being a bit snappy this morning.

She was right, I held my hands up and apologised.

We then had a conversation about how I'm hardwired from my childhood to look for danger. This is one of the primary "skills" that has led me to run a successful business for most of my life. The reason being that by being able to see around corners, I'm very good at not making a mistake that kills the business.

Unfortunately like all strengths, this strength brings a set of weaknesses. The weakness it brings for me is an obsession on the things that could go wrong, what has gone wrong, how to do better, how to be better and so on. Aka negativity.

I wouldn't be where I am without this blessing and its associated curses but I do sometimes wish I could just go with the flow some more.

To that end, I work out, I spend less time in front of a computer than ever before, I practice stoicism, I have wider hobbies...but still, it's an ongoing thing to manage.

I guess this is no different to people with athletic abilities who have tortured their bodies for years and now get sore knees/hips etc from time to time.

I’ve just started reading the Introduction to Internal Family Systems and your comment resonates.

Here’s a short overview of what it is, from the IFS Institute website:

> IFS is a transformative tool that conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self. We believe the mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Just like members of a family, inner parts are forced from their valuable states into extreme roles within us. Self is in everyone. It can’t be damaged. It knows how to heal.

Similar, but life hit me fairly hard in my early thirties. Things can and will go wrong for all of us. Being in a pit of actual negativity is an interesting place to be.

Which led me to mindfulness practice and understanding what "the flow" is. Maybe something to consider along with whatever stoicism practice entails.

Ugh substack, I can't believe you use that platform.

Jk, but I feel like we've seen some variation of the above comment on a thousand hn threads. Somebody commenting about the design being distracting or something completely derailing what was otherwise an interesting article.

I really hate when someone puts something out there and the first comments are just shitting on the person. And often people just assume the worst about people and always assume they have the worst intentions.

A useful AI tool would hide all comments mentioning:

- problems with JavaScript

- problems with the platform the article is hosted on

- how this author’s experience, like everything that has ever happened in world history, is just survivorship bias and thus can be disregarded (this one is a personal pet peeve)

This is one reason HN is often not-subtly mocked. We condone the behavior by not shutting it down. And the negativity consumes a lot of the air in the room.

Years ago, I stopped coming here for a fairly long time, because I found all the criticisms to be accurate and off putting. But when I came back after spending that time reading things more on twitter and reddit, I found the experience here incredibly refreshing.

I think it's just that two things are true at once. All the mockery and criticism is accurate, but I think it's also the case that the signal to noise ratio here has remained unusually high for an unusually long period of time. (Probably due to years of tireless thoughtful moderation.)

I don't know. I feel like criticism on HN is usually at least well-founded and obvious dumb takes get downvoted immediately and then we just move on. In my limited experience, reddit and other platforms are much worse. I read HN on my way to work and not my local newspaper because the community is much less toxic.

It's a mixed bag on HN. Reading about some programming-related stuff sometimes convinces me I don't want to talk to other devs anonymously at all because it's an endless well of pedanticism, gripes about people doing it wrong, and really bad takes that serve to ensure discussion remains at a relatively basic level.

>reddit and other platforms are much worse

This can still be like being the skinniest kid at fat camp. If social media in general is bad for your mental health, I don't know if it's a ringing endorsement to be the "least bad for your health."

Fair. I for one enjoy all the technical expertise that's present in the HN hivemind and every time I visit the front page I learn something new. The "mostly software but sometimes a wikipedia article about geology" nature of the platform really strikes a chord with me and I just choose not to read discussions that are 10 layers deep.

I completely agree but have we gone full meta? Being negative about the negativity? ;)

Here's preemptively complaining about people who will complain about complaints about complaints.

Complaints about complaints make sense!

Just look at this thread here, it's cliche at this point:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40154731

Ironically this is the topmost comment as I write this.

Outside of Medium which gets shat on for good reason imo (used to be good, now a mess of paywalls) I've not come across this sentiment.

I'll probably start noticing it now though, frequency illusion and all, cheers for that haha

One unexplored aspect might be the difference between medias allowing upvotes and the others : I would expect that in the first ones, readers are going to feel that they did a good enough job of being supportive by just leaving an upvote ?

(Even worse for medias not allowing downvotes but still comments : now the only way to signal negative feedback is to leave a full-blown comment!)

Reminds me of this reflection, comparing ethical practice to improv theater — improv looks spontaneous, but it’s not that simple:

Ethics cannot be simply about rehearsing and repeating the same script and story over and over again, albeit on a fresh stage with new players.

This does not do sufficient justice to the unfolding newness of each moment of creation. The […] community learns to take the right things for granted, and on the basis of this faithfulness, it trusts itself to improvise within it tradition. Improvisation means a community formed in the right habits trusting itself to embody its tradition in new and often challenging circumstances ...

Ethics is not about being clever in a crisis but about forming a character that does not realize it has been in a crisis until the "crisis" is over. It is just the same for improvisers in the theater. Improvisation is not about being spontaneous and witty in the moment, but about trusting oneself to do and say the obvious.

— Samuel Wells

How you train, how you wear a groove into the patterns of your thought and your actions and your instincts, are how you will act when there’s no time for thinking. If you do it right, you won’t even notice.

Love this. Years of therapy have made me realize therapists train you to create and use a hypervisor for your brain. Your brain thinks it is in full control, but a meta-cognitive part of it (the hypervisor) is capable of watching it and stepping in to intervene. It can be as tangible as not returning evil for evil when you have every right to. For whatever reason, this resonates more than simply calling it executive function.

Sounds to me like you're describing the prefrontal cortex.

That's the first time I've seen that quote. That last sentence is so true and applies to so many things. It can sort of be summed up as "being, not doing".

It reminds me a lot of comedians. I remember listening to a podcast with Theo Von where someone asked him if he liked rats. Without hesitation he casually replied "I once had to share a room one night with 2 umm... not rats but the limousines of rats -- ferrets".

I don't think there's much preparation or studying for saying that, you need to "be" it not "do" it.

I know the quote literally ends with "do and say the obvious", but I think "being" is what allows that to happen. "Doing" in my mind is cramming hard right before a test or interview and "being" is walking in with no preparation and acing it.

I got off social media (mostly) a few years ago because it looked like a significant portion of users would be locked in an overly-evaluative state of mind by it when commenting. This person sucks, or that brand should be canceled, or such and such isn’t exactly to my specifications. And it was clear that these users weren’t exactly happy. It was like they were an avatar of a weird collective of thoughts that needed to express itself and humans were just fuel for the fire.

I don’t think we were made to be in an evaluative state of mind as much as social media disposes us to.

More to the point, I don’t want to be like that. So I left. It was an easy decision once I saw this. It’s gotten much worse with every passing year. Weird Internet is now anywhere with a comment section.

That "negativity" aspect is common in other fields too: imagine you are nowadays an economist, a journalist, an architect, a footballer, a politician, an activist of some ideology or even an artist: would you escape that negativity ?

Negativity is not related to any industry. It is rather inherent to our nature. Because it is important to our survival. Our brain always seeks for signs of what may go wrong or what is actually wrong to help us protect or improve ourselves.

Interesting question! I think if I were a journalist, by nature I would be looking for positive optimistic stories on my beat, because that's legitimately what I find more interesting in the world. (I kind of think of it like entropy; the default is for things to be hard and to work out poorly, so I think it's more interesting when that doesn't happen.)

But I think if that were really my job, rather than just a passion project, I would be subject to the same financial incentives as any other journalist, which may very well drive me to more pessimistic stories, as those seem to drive more engagement and thus more dollars.

Then why any random mainstream newspaper we open, we find much more negative news that positive ones ?

Actually that is what journalists do to keep us addicted to media: spreading negativity and anxiety (energy crisis, food crisis, climate crisis, security crisis, war crisis, refugees crisis, inflation crisis ...etc).

Haha :)

> Then why any random mainstream newspaper we open, we find much more negative news that positive ones ? :)

Because, as I mentioned, that's what people engage with more, so that's what they are financially incentived to publish.

Yes, you nailed it.

We are what we do and the consequences of that. It can be hard to change habits but in the end it might be worth doing. I spent a lot of effort to stop as a first response disagreeing when someone says something though I'm not sure about the actual consequences of it I do feel like people are nicer to me and my social interactions have been better.

> One, we become focused on the negative, so we train ourselves to see flaws. This focuses us to be negative by a fault, and we see this online when say, there’s a post about a cool article. The first comment will be a criticism of a minor point wrong in the article, and then there will be chains of comments criticizing the criticism. It’s like nobody even read the article. This also leads to a lack of appreciation and gratitude where nobody says “that was a really great idea”, “I like that they said this…” or “thanks for sharing!”.

I believe there was a rule in HN guidelines about posting simple "Thanks" or "me too" comments, but I can no longer find it. Maybe we truly spontaneously train ourselves to not post such comments. On the other side, a long stream of "Thanks for sharing" comments without any more substance is pretty boring.

When I see a chain of empty “thanks, great” comments, my fake reviews alarm goes off immediately.

Our minds are wired for living in tiny groups, compared to the internet. The latter brings new rules to the game and you have to adapt. That creates the dilemma of annoying noobs vs annoying olds. It all was known since forever as a netiquette. Human defaults simply n/a here, everyone has to learn and cope.

I fully agree.

To answer what can be done, as an industry: stop overfunding and overemphasizing attempts to leverage cutting-edge technology, with all its unknowns and bugs, into The Answer To All Our Problems. Instead, take existing, well-understood technology, and fulfill a dream deferred. A concrete example: back in 2012, what was all the rage? Cloud. Everything's going to be in The Cloud. The Cloud is going to solve all our problems. (Aside: A decade on, couldn't it be argued that cloud-enabled SaaS has become the source of a lot of our problems? Oops.)

Then, a guy in his garage goes, "Oh, btw, did you know that we could totally take cell phone screens and make relatively cheap virtual reality headsets with them?"

"If only we had~" mindset versus "Look what we can do with-!" mindset.

Many times, we don't realize how our brains/selves have been conditioned. It's kind of a luxury to even be able to have the time and space to gain this insight for many people.

interesting whether it’s a learned pattern as the post suggests or maybe a personal trait that leads a person to a software dev career.

either way seems these observations are super on point for me personally

I believe it. I'm a pretty negative person and I'm starting to think it's been hurting me for years

:^) you say that because you are negative. Try rethinking it and seeing if you still agree.

Yes, what if it helped all these years and you aren’t even negative? i.e. still have a greater potential in criticizing, i.e. analyzing things.

Daily Gratitude and journaling it helps shift our brains to a more positive glass half filled state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPPPFqsECz0

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