“Raise your hand if you’ve ever encountered any of the following—and don’t put it down.” becomes “Elevate your hand within the occasion you’ve ever encountered any of the next—and don’t do it down.”
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There is a “hacker news” tag at the bottom that indicates that they‘re scraping the content popular on Hacker News. Here’s another example: Stolen: https://newshimalaya.com/2020/09/30/compact-nuclear-fusion-reactor-is-very-seemingly-to-work-reviews-counsel/ … Original: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-reactor.html …
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But they also link to the original at the bottom?
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Even their Twitter account exhibits the same sort of interesting thesaurus-y mangling of the words. Here, “won” was replaced by “gained” – but rather naïvely.pic.twitter.com/dhKPyHw3fR
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Does anyone have any idea what’s going on? Are the word changes some auto translation back and forth, or deliberate to get rid of the scent? What is the reasoning/business model behind this – ads?
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I mean I *wish* I could write as well as this:pic.twitter.com/EW4NfDztSL
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Here’s another one, with a slightly differently broken “translation” and even a few comments from Hacker News present as native comments under the article: https://jellyent.com/2020/09/30/when-fonts-fall/?lang=en … “Elevate your hand while you’ve ever encountered any of the next—and don’t manufacture it down.”pic.twitter.com/xJxJ2p2weM
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And another one. This is so fascinating to me. https://thecyberguides.com/when-fonts-fall/ … “Lift your hand whereas you’ve ever encountered any of the following—and don’t place it down.”pic.twitter.com/7hBvq3aSVq
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This is apparently called “spinning” and is a dark SEO practice (thx,
@quince): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning …1 reply 1 retweet 16 likesShow this thread
Also TIL rogeting: “modifying a published source by substituting synonyms for sufficient words to fool plagiarism detection software, often resulting in the creation of new meaningless phrases through extensive synonym swapping,” as in “Roget's Thesaurus.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogeting
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Replying to @mwichary
Sort of implies that plagiarism detection software is pretty crap.
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Replying to @mwichary
Fascinating, but what a disappointing constellation of incentives had to be followed to arrive here! Seems like such a sad waste of resources--both in productive talent that could tackle more meaningful problems, and in the compute time and energy spent on "generating" content.
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