Hacker News Reader

Comment by troydavis | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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?

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.

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.

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 !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com