AskSteem: What are your thoughts on ghostwriters?
I had a discussion recently with another steemian and curator in many different projects about ghostwriters. This started after I noticed a certain account who just magically became better at english/spelling over night so much so that I suspected it to be plagiarising but after not being able to find any sources of plagiarism I had to conclude that the author must have someone else write posts for him now.
The curator I discussed it with said she thought ghostwriting was okay and that "many probably do it" here on Steem. So I wanted to write a bit why I'm personally not okay with it after remembering that I wrote a post a long time ago talking about this where I for a brief moment considered having someone write posts for me but decided not to. The difference here would still be that if I was having someone ghostwrite for me, I would make it public in the post similar to the Fantasy Football posts where another author was writing them who received the post rewards in beneficiaries and it was noted in each post who the author was. So just to reiterate, I'd be okay with others posting something someone else wrote on their blog as long as it's public and the curators reading/curating it know about it - much like when authors decide to repost something it should let the curators know it is a repost and maybe even link to the original so they can decide if they want to re-reward it depending on what the original post made in rewards, etc.
Anyway. As a manual curator this is not a big deal, I can often notice if someone's writing changes a lot over night and decide not to upvote it or maybe even downvote it for that reason alone (I haven't done that so far but I wanted to get your opinions on it first before making a decision). The problem, much like many other side-effects that come from it are autovotes and trail votes. Many keep saying we need a patreon on Steem even though I keep pointing them at Steemauto or the autovote service of @buildteam that I can't remember the name of right now. So one of the side-effects of autovotes in my opinion has been that authors get lazy when they know the votes are guaranteed. The quality may drop, the engagement of the author on his own posts or on other authors content may drop and in my opinion it's one of the saddest things to see an author reap rewards while barely replying to his comment section or acknowledging having read the comments with a vote. It also shows a lack of gratitude.
Now say someone in my position who's been writing on Steem for over 3.5 years now, even though I didn't focus on authoring for the first year cause I thought curation and raising engagement was more important (and sure it did help my follower amount but that's nothing to brag about today as it means literally nothing if most followers are gone and you get no engagement on your posts). Imagine if I hired a writer from say a part of the world where even a fraction of my post rewards would be worth it for them to ghost write and I'd be posting 2-3 times per day thanks to it. Let's say you find out I'm doing so, how would that make you feel?
Personally I'd kind of feel cheated as a curator. As a curator I don't always curate content just for the content. I curate the authors for the experiences I have with them, what I believe they bring to Steem other than the content and what they do for Steem otherwise. So in a way even manual votes are kind of like a Patreon service. You're investing in the users and not just the content, especially when Steem is still this young and content may not really have the value they are receiving today because they may not be bringing in new users or keeping users here from your content alone. We are still kind of at the phase where we have very little consumers and everyone wants to be an author, where comments are barely getting rewarded and engagement is low. I'm sure we are going to overcome these problems with SMT's, communities and easier onboarding, but to get back to the issue at hand - it wouldn't feel right to take a portion of the rewardpool when all I did was copy-paste someone elses work and reap in those autovotes or trail votes while only paying the original author part of them.
It would feel like free rewards and as a curator I would much rather upvote the original author if I knew who it was. I remember a case here on Steem two years ago or so where a ghostwriter found his post he had written on Steem and came here explaining his situation and received a lot of votes for it. That was kind of wholesome in my opinion cause he was from a country with a bad economy and told us that ghostwriting was one of his major incomes until he came to Steem himself and outed the author who was pretending to be writing the posts themselves.
So to keep this a bit shorter than it already is. I think ghostwriting should be okay unless you're trying to hide that fact. Even better would be if you created an account for that user and shared beneficiaries with him so everyone knows how much you're keeping yourself and how much is going to the real writer. I understand some may not want to post starting from scratch because they know it may take a long time to get a following and curation (even though curation is at an all time high right now and we're desperately missing content creators), but at least that way they would be open about it and curators could judge themselves how they want to reward such content knowing the details of the rewardsplit and the original author being okay with their cut.
Imagine if they are getting $2 per article while the poster here is getting $20 and like that old case those ghostwriters would sooner or later find their own articles (steem's google SEO is pretty strong so it shouldn't be too hard). I bet it would not feel great.
What are your thoughts on the matter?
It would be tricky to develop a mechanism to detect 'ghostwritten' material and especially one that would be accurate. Writing can be a really 'hit or miss' thing because sometimes the words just do not come easily (or eloquently) so variations in the quality of writing are always going to occur but that being said I think it is better to poorly write something yourself than paying someone else to do the writing for you especially on a platform like this where original content is the 'life blood' of the system.
The cases where ghost writing would be okay (in my perspective) is when an author wants to appeal to an audience in a language they do not know well enough to write in so they write a piece in their native language and then have someone write a translation of the article in a different language and include both written pieces in their article. Even in such cases they should assuredly 'give credit where credit is due' but let's face it there are some underlying human tendencies that are going to make that the exception and not the rule.
When I see posts that have images/videos/writing that people obviously copy and pasted from 'the internet' it immediately turns me off to not just that particular article but also to the 'creator' themselves regardless of how good the rest of their content might be. I actually ran into this yesterday where I read an awesome post that was littered with content elements that I had seen elsewhere on the internet and I had an internal debate on whether I should vote on it or not because I asked myself the question: Should I acknowledge the authentic parts of this and ignore the inauthentic parts and furthermore did I (as the reader) actually gain something meaningful from it? In the end I voted on the post because I wanted to encourage them to keep writing. In hindsight I later thought to point out (in the comments of the article) how distasteful I found such inauthentic elements but could not figure out how to word it in a way that would actually help the author and not just discourage them.
I have encountered the above scenario numerous times on here where folks use content elements from the internet (especially memes) in their posts and if said elements are the 'preview' image (or an obvious cut and paste title) I do not even look at the article. The post I referred to previously had a unique title and preview image which lead me to look at it but once I opened it I was like 'Fuck! Look at all this copy and paste garbage.' This sort of thing (using content elements from the internet) is way more obvious to me than the ghost writing that you describe but I think it is a much larger problem than the ghost writing itself but I am also biased because I am not a curator.
Perhaps a mechanism to flag potential posts as ghost written (that do not credit the author) would be helpful but as with all flagging mechanisms (aside from obvious plagiarism and spam) it is a slippery slope.
I'd never submit a ghost written post (if I discovered one) for a curie because there is an underlying dishonesty in it. Even if they mention the true author, and/or set beneficiaries to them, the person presenting the ghostwritten post is reaping the rewards of the increase in their reputation score... something that may mean little now, but could mean a lot if steem is more successful in the future.
I guess I'm old fashioned, and want to see less gaming of the system. I know it's par for the course on steem, but (as a dedicated content creator who doesn't engage in these tactics) it just wears you down after a while watching gaming get rewarded.
So, as a curator, I choose not to reward anything with even the slightest sniff of gaming the system, including a ghost written post. Personal choice.
P.s. I like that story of the ghostwriter who turned up on steem and ousted the person who'd hired them 🤣
Wholesome is a good description. As someone who now makes more than half my income writing commissioned articles (occasionally ghostwritten), it's nice to hear a story like that where a writer wins out. Freelance writing can be a cutthroat business where the writer often gets the raw deal pay wise.
I don't see this at all, especially after the years of bid bots reputation will mean very little if anything. I'm looking forward to communities adding their own rep scores and maybe someone creating an oracle SMT that gives another meaning to a reputation score and the front-ends implementing it.
Yeah, that's why I don't like ghostwriting. In the beginning of Steem there was a lot of "i'll post for you cause I have this and that many followers and trail + autovotes and share the rewards with you", although this was before resteems existed too there was a lot of gaming going on there as well. Looking back at those accounts that did that and the rewards they shared with the "real author accounts" you can see many of those accounts ended up dead and were probably them themselves pretending to be different authors.
On that note I'm also looking forward to a community with verified users in some way where verifying you're a unique person through your other social media accounts or KYC if you are okay with it gets incentivized but not disincentivizing those wanting to stay anon like voice.com wants to do. Many want to stay anon for many reasons and it doesn't mean it's just because they want to game the system or do something worse at some point. Reputation will matter and I hope we get a better system for it by then.
Yeah, you're probably right about the rep thing, but I stand by everything else I've said in that comment.
I'm 100% with you on this. You must know as a curator that it makes life so much easier (when considering a guild 'large' vote) if a user has linked their steem page on another social media account to show that level of accountability and identity.
When I was super active with curie, during 2017 bull run, I used to occasionally comment on a new steemians post who was an excellent content creator, asking them to consider either making an intro post for verification, or linking their steem page on their YouTube/Blog etc so that I could submit them with confidence that content wasn't plagiarized. This was rare as generally reposted content is discoraged for submission, but sometimes the content was so good that it deserved to be an exception to the rule. Hopefully 'communities' will make this whole process easier in regards to verification. Maybe by building an 'opt in' place where people who produce high quality content, and don't mind verifying their identity in some way, can all interact, locking out the spam jockeys and shit posters. It would be a great way for curation guilds to boost the high quality up, with less of the work and I would imagine it would drive the value of any SMT attached to that community positively through the fact that a tone of decent content creators who've left steem for those very reasons of gaming mentioned above would return.
Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I'd like to see a virtuous cycle happen in a community where the potential rewards from manual curation from guilds, and other people who genuinely want to see quality and hard work go rewarded, provides higher incentive than all of the autovote shenanigans that proliferate now.
I get this completely, but if you want to stay anon, then the reality is that you need to be aware that curators (especially) view your content with a healthy level of skepticism. Lol, but I guess that's what plagiarism checks are for... they are a ball ache though 😂 I'd prefer to see that 'utopian' community I described above emerge.
For non-personal things a ghost writer is okay I guess (like the football posts), but as soon as there is personal opinion involved it no longer suits. If someone uses a ghostwriter or Fiverr to write a post to earn on, the writer deserves the entire amount - if you do the work, you get the pay. It depends on content though.
If I remember correctly, JerryB has writers do the work for him claiming it as his own.
This is similar to my thoughts.
For some project like ocd where no persona exists, ghost writing would be expected.
To share a personal opinion or experience it is down right shameful.
To offer advice, we are into serious greyzone territory. Personally I am against it and will cut this person off. I can usually tell by quality engagement of they are for real or not since ghost writers don't tend to respond to comments with POB.
Yep.
If there is any engagement at all.
I had to look this up, I heard the term before but never checked.
If the person in question does not have a great command of the English language I suppose that could be a valid reason.
Do these people get paid, either as a beneficiary or off the blockchain? It does seem 'cheating' a little to me.
I don't think I could keep my respect for someone who did this personally.
Well, I think if someone is ghostwriting, it's best to acknowledge the writer or the person who has assisted in compiling and creating an error - free article. We can also conclude most people who ghostwrite might not want to acknowledge the entity who helped out because they feel they probably won't get much rewards. Also, the thought that other users and readers would always conclude it's not their work especially times when they don't ghostwrite because the post might still be judged as a work belonging to someone else.
Personally, I feel the writer who has assisted should be acknowledged and if this can't be done, then I'll prefer the owner of the account making the post how best he knows how to; with bad English, wrong spellings, mixing English with native tongue...this way he'll learn to be better after a while as this is one of the core importance of being an active blogger, you get better.
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Its kind of a double entendre to call it "ghost writing" and then reveal who actually wrote it lol.
I've actually ghost written for a few account on Steem that professionalism demands I keep anonymous and when I see those posts in the account and the fact that the autovotes and bid bots(before new steem) take it to trending page, I feel both happy and sad.
Happy because I go through the comments and people accept the quality as being good enough to trend but sad because I know that if I posted it with my account, I'd never get that much traction and votes.
Your point about making the real author a beneficiary is valid but it won't fly because the people who use ghost writers are trying to build a "reputation". So they pay a few bucks to people like me, get their posts written, look awesome and you'd be surprised how big a few dollars is to a Nigerian.
The whole debacle reminds me of a quote that goes " the end justifies the means". The game is the game, after all.
That's what I mean though and what I feel is unfair, the author takes advantage of people in need to get "free rewards" for not doing any work. Not what Steem is about in my eyes as I want it to remove the borders and imbalance that already exists in this world and reward people for the value they bring to the platform, not what the amount means to them depending on their location.
Your idea is noble and ideal but it'll take more than one person to do so. I spend time going through steem and observe how certain authors always get big upvotes(keep in mind that big is relative) irrespective of what they post. I observe how their quality have largely remained the same in months but always and I mean always get big upvotes. I compare that to mine that to my content that I try to improve regularly and have to go the long way round to get upvotes. It pains me.
The reward system is inconsistent, it seems to protect the interest of the big fish and ignores the small fish. The only time I ever get big upvotes is when I win contests, else I get my regular tiny votes.
So if a John Doe comes to me and says "Hey man, I love the way you write, I'd pay you $x to write something similar or even better for me. That's a lot better than you get", I'd say that is both flattering and rewarding, and I'd gladly take the job. Would you say it is unfair to me considering I've been creating content for more than two years now?
It also steps into the "just because you have connections or were here early you're getting rewards for free".
This is also a fact that cannot be erased. People with connection and those that got in in 2016 have it better than the rest of us
I think an unacknowledged ghost writer is bad and those type of posts deserve nothing. It's just another way of people trying to maximise their milking of steem.
Originality pays off but you have to be consistent and write every day or else the probability of your post going viral is really low.
It is so sad and embarrassing when you let someone make a post on your behalf.
But maybe they learned already how to write. Just for example for me, I am not a blogger or even a photographer but through steemit, I learned a lot from people around my virtual friends. I also became vigilant about what I should write. I became gradually learning day by day. Anyway, I was staying in college as a teacher but I did not finish it. Then, it was back 1987, I forgot how to use the correct grammar but thank you steemit, it gave me challenges and enhanced my knowledge once again. Once I put it in the garbage but since I joined steemit for almost 2 years now, it really changed my aspect of life.
I hope that there will be a good contents creator that will be curated well with good curation. For me, I accepted the fact that nobody upvoted my post though how hard to make it better. It's fine, but seeing a post that is not good but the curation is above the expectation, that is another story, my dear @acidyo.
Agree with your thoughts and I am in your side.
Steem on.
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