all 29 comments

[–]bobcat[S] 34 points35 points  (21 children)

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

The current number 1 on Reddit is ripped off with no attribution. http://reddit.com/info/qpus/comments

This list is over a year old, and has appeared (been ripped off) many times all over the net.

Is this community incapable of finding original sources, or do they just approve of stealing?

Please STOP posting links to stolen material.

EDIT: I found the source of the very funny list:

http://grove.ufl.edu/~ggsa/gaymarriage.html

"GatorGSA continued its tradition of clever, irreverent, edit: and SARCASTIC flyers on Valentine's Day 2004 with a dirty dozen reasons why homosexual marriage is "bad" and why gay people should not be allowed to get married.Please link to this page (12reasons.com) and give GatorGSA proper credit when making a reference to this list, and if you're going to print it, why not go for the PDF? It's free to redistribute, of course - it's funny not to!"

[–]laprice 14 points15 points  (12 children)

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

linkjacking has been a problem on reddit since the beginning. It's a Please Don't but people don't seem to pay attention, and are mostly too focused on the little hit of dopamine associated with understanding and reacting to novelty to bother with actual research.

It is a problem that would be susceptible to an automated solution though, a partnership with a search engine to do a count of the number of sentence length matches within the main body of the article would catch most instances of plagiarism (though picking out the original is sometimes hard even for humans).

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

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[deleted]

    [–]pasokan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

    ++1 for that suggestion

    [–]breakfast-pants -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

    Yeah, that would work great; users could vote that some random story about Digg should be buried, and then Paul Graham could make a whiny blog post about how it isn't fair that the owners of reddit are engaged in censorship. Opps, it already happened, s/Digg/reddit

    [–]sob062571 4 points5 points  (4 children)

    sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

    But define "linkjacking" Lots of articles site other sources of information to compose a story. Shit, you know how many times I see stories on blogs that show up in news casts or on this site days later that give no credit. Out right plagairism is wrong but not everything should be considered a "linkjack"

    [–][deleted]  (3 children)

    sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

    [deleted]

      [–]sob062571 4 points5 points  (2 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      That I understand but I have seen it where people will call a linkjack from a You Tube clip on a site and I have to wonder why on Earth does You Tube let you embed stuff.

      What you described above is what I would absolutely consider a link jack but sometimes it's not so cut and dry.

      [–]gxti 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      YouTube lets you embed stuff so bloggers who create original content can use it for hosting. 99% of the time though, it's just some assclown making a blog post about a video, adding a one-sentence comment, and submitting it to 30 news sites.

      [–]bobcat[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Not too hard for a determined researcher!

      EDIT: moved info to my original post.

      [–]maxwellhill 1 point2 points  (2 children)

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      Upmod as plagiarism is cheating.

      Strangely, I couldn't find any reference to "linkjacking" on wikipedia - should it be?

      Edit: typo error

      [–]jones77 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      It used to be there. Look again. Perhaps: linkjack. Hmmmm, looks like someone deleted it ...

      [–]cheezymoogle -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      You know what this means, don't you?! Wikipedia killed JFK!

      [–]cartman81 1 point2 points  (4 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Why not make it a responsibility of the readers to dowmmodd (report?) articles they know are linkjacked (with a comment stating that and possibly a link to the original source..)??

      Expected the individual submitter to throughly research the origins, references, veracity of each post is a very considerable burden.. Let people post what they find "interesting" enough to share and then let the thousands of reddit readers (more?) find out if the material is plagiarized.. (and downmodd (or report) the post if it is..)

      IMHO, the 744 redditors who upvoted the "number 1 post on reddit" (+) which was a Linkjack (or stolen, plagiarized, ripped off) are more to blame than one submitter...And there will be many redditors who downmodded the post because they don't agree and not because it was linkjacked.


      (+) in spite of various comments which stated it was a dupe and/or a linkjacked post..

      http://reddit.com/info/qpus/comments/cqrdx

      http://reddit.com/info/qpus/comments/cqqqa

      http://reddit.com/info/qpus/comments/cqt1b

      [–]flyinglunatic 3 points4 points  (2 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Doesn't that ruin the training of the recommendation engine for your own personal use, which is reddit's secrect sauce afterall?

      I mean, I see people say things like, downmodded for this, and upmodded for that, but heck, you're just polluting your recommendation personalization right?

      [–]cartman81 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Doesn't that ruin the training of the recommendation engine...

      On second thoughts, you're right... Downmodding dupe/linkjacked will screw up the recommendation engine.. Maybe "reporting" them will work better..

      [–]dragonsi55 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Great point.

      [–]theram4 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Why not make it a responsibility of the readers to dowmmodd (report?) articles they know are linkjacked

      Because half the time, when someone claims an article is a dupe or linkjack, that comment is downmodded into obscurity.

      [–]degusticrazytaxi 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Is this community incapable of finding original sources, or do they just approve of stealing?

      Its not stealing as no one was deprived of anything. Sourcing without attribution is not "stealing" buddy, dont make me slap you.

      [–]bobcat[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      The authors were deprived of credit, and we were all deprived of context.

      Slap!

      [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      So there, posted non-linkjacked

      [–]writetoalok 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Heres what we can do when we see a linkjacked article to try and resolve this.

      • Google to find the original article. Just search for the title or few salient words from the first paragraph.
      • Search for the original article in Reddit, if it is not already posted, post and win Karma lottery. If not vote up original.
      • Down vote the linkjacked version.

      Maybe Reddit can come up with some automated solution for this ... ? Maybe come up with something like Slashdots related stories feature?

      [–]dragonsi55 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Linkjacks perform a very important function which should be dealt with before doing anything too quickly.

      Any system has hidden linkages which perform functions that are not obvious.

      If I understand it correctly, a particular URL can be posted only once to Reddit.

      There are many good reasons for this.

      However, there are many subsidiary factors in how well the posting does, and thus how many people have an opportunity to view its content. Some of these factors include: time of day, qualities of the title, who posted it . . .

      But this means a great post, that I would want to see, can slip through the cracks, especially the crack of 'my available time to look at Reddit.'

      A good idea can get cited at multiple locations. This is a fast-and-loose variation of citations in a peer-reviewed journal.

      Most people, whether an author or a poster, would want the 'chain of evidence' noted. But as a reader, the idea usually takes precedent over the idea's history.

      There is an opportunity here. There are programs used to uncover plagiarism. There are programs to look at social connections (see 'social network analysis'). Are there programs to uncover linkages of ideas, or the abstraction of one idea to another?

      At any rate, as a consumer of Reddit, I would rather see the idea or image and trace the roots myself, than risk not seeing it and missing something good.

      [–]captian2 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      You know posting a youtube video you uploaded with the video on your blog and some things written about it is not linkjacking, it is using youtube the way it was designed to be used. I hardly watch youtube videos at youtube, I use it as a nice streaming and embedding service, but anytime anyone posts a youtube video someone imediately claims linkjacking and posts the one directly to the youtube site, that pisses me off, so does everyone calling linkjacking while making good comments or replies on a good article, paraphrasing it and then linking to it... someone always says the blog linkjacked and links right to the article... If they wrote about it, responded to it and provided summary and link, it is a valid way to share thoughts, ideas, and information.

      [–]silverstrike 3 points4 points  (2 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Come on guys, lists like that are really just chain letters. That list is about as viral as anything on the web can get.

      Does anyone really care that it got passed through another loop of people?

      [–]bobcat[S] 15 points16 points  (1 child)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Yes, because that list has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and if you can't respect that, I can't respect you. They're nice enough to let us copy it, we should be nice enough to give them credit.

      [–]marklubi 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

      Just try saying that 10 times quickly!

      [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (1 child)

      sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

      What? And stop looking like a boingboing clone?
http://www.reddit.com/comments/qt1g/stop_posting_plagiarized_material_to_reddit_please
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