The incentives to plagiarize
#5 in science recently went viral for sharing that #2 in technology plagiarized her a year ago (right after #2 just went 10k-like viral, again). Substack is freaking. Plagiarism is obviously bad, and I think everyone is shocked to learn that #2 got away with blatant copy-paste work, but I want to focus on the nature of what was plagiarized along with why platforms reward cheap writing.
If someone else can put their name on your writing and almost get away with it, it means you haven’t written something only can you write. The plagiarized post was digital cultural journalism: mostly facts and studies, with only a few “I” mentions that are too vague to be anchored to any specific writer. Obviously it hurts to see your hard work get celebrated under someone else’s name—I’d be pissed too— but research is becoming hyper-commoditized. You have to assume it will be coincidentally/accidentally/purposefully refactored by hucksters, bots parrots, friends, and rivals. If #5 had integrated her research with singular, relevant moments of her life, it would be hard—if not impossible—to rip off. Personal experience is the last moat.
This situation feels like a predictable consequence of engagement-based competition. Among us are people willing to sacrifice craft for clout, at various tiers of insanity. I’ve been noticing high-volume accounts in the Top 10 with obviously AI-generated notes and essays. I wonder who actually reads/likes this stuff, until I look in the comments and realize it’s, likely, all bots. Is Substack status that easily hackable? I guess this is a growth hack that brings you an algorithmic edge in getting discovered by humans, so you can eventually replace the slop with your own writing?
As extrinsic games get increasingly weird, the status of winning them will get decreasingly valuable, I think. If #2 is a slopjockey, I don’t care to reach #1 because the whole game is now polluted (I’m actually a fan of leaderboards, but they need to be merit-based and unhackable). I just don’t know if platforms care to systematically fix this, because status-hackers create volume and speed that make a platform look vibrant to an undiscerning eye/investor.
Over enough time, I think misaligned platforms and those who hack them will eventually lose. The internally-driven writers have to put up with a lot of noise and chaos, but since they aren’t anchored in hacks, they’re less likely to have their means of validation suddenly disappear. It’s OK to be a tortoise in hell.