Scorum is quickly becoming a wonderful source of sports news and opinion pieces. At such an early stage in its adoption, I have been overjoyed at the high level of content being posted on a daily basis. Truly, there are some really talented writers here already, and the potential for the platform to become a behemoth is undeniable.
My major concern when signing up, however, was the potential for unsavoury characters to be rewarded for content they didn't create. If kept unchecked, plagiarism has the ability to completely undo all of the amazing work that content creators are putting in at Scorum.
The first issue with this kind of abuse is that it reduces the overall quality of the platform. Why would potential users want to sign up if the place is littered with articles found elsewhere on the internet? Dilution of quality is something that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Secondly, it really sucks to see work that has been plagiarised receiving rewards when those upvotes could be going to someone who has put in the time and effort to create something original and worthwhile to share with the world.
Scorum Abusers
Many of my fears were quashed when I came across a post (found here) made by @NHL. In the post, @NHL discusses a Discord community that he created within which you can be rewarded for helping to report/flag posts that abuse the system. Please do check this Discord group out if you're interested in helping clean up the platform.
I headed over to the channel, had a read through the reporting guide, and set off on my way to see what I could dig up on Scorum. I was actually pretty shocked at how easy it was to find plagiarised content. Even within the trending/hot sections, I found posts that were copied word for word from other online articles, platforms, and news outlets without any form of referencing or opinion added. In some cases, these articles had earned a lot of rewards from upvotes.
The alarming thing for me is how many plagiarised articles are already on the platform when there are currently less than 30,000 members. My worry is that this could quickly get out of hand as the platform grows, and that's just terrible news for all of us. It's time for us to set a precedent of zero tolerance for abusers of the platform.
The Scorum Abusers Discord group is a great place to start, but everyone needs to play their part in keeping Scorum as free from abuse as possible. Whether you plan to join the group or not, I am here today to ask you to keep an eye open for platform abusers. If you suspect that a post is plagiarised then please try to do a quick search on Google to see if you can find an original source.
Any plagiarised content would ideally be reported to Scorum Abusers, but if you don't have the time for that then please do leave a comment of your own under the post to inform the user and other readers that they have been caught red handed. The best method here, in my opinion, is to leave a link to the original article so your abuse claim is easily validated to others.
Flagging plagiarised content is a must. Yes, it costs some VP, but that's preferable to a platform abuser running away with earnings that could go to someone deserving of them. They are stealing from the original content creator, the reward pool, and the potential future growth of Scorum.
If we all work together to self-moderate and eradicate platform abusers then they will soon get bored and move on. The only reason they are here is to generate earnings. Cut off their revenue source and they have no reason at all to post their plagiarised work.
Great Community
I'd like to end this post by saying thank you to @NHL for setting up Scorum Abusers and everyone else who has gotten involved in protecting this amazing platform we have. I am sure the Scorum team have some methods up their sleeves to combat abuse, but it's important that we all do our best to help out where we can.
Scorum Needs You!
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