For the anecdote, I had the same experience 22 years ago. My blog was quite young, and was propulsed by Dotclear (self-hosted, there was no Dotclear provider at the time)
Readers pointed out another Dotclear blog that was using another theme (so totally not looking like mine) and which was copy/pasting my own posts but not all of them. As their was no LLM at the time, it looked like someone truly copy-pasted the posts they liked (there were the most personal ones). Also, my nickname had been removed to make it like the author was the one writing.
I don’t understand why someone wanted to do that but, today, it is even easier.
I have a similar anecdote in the book industry: a friend of mine, quite a famous writer, was warned by a reader that one of his book had been plagiarized.
It appeared that a very local, self-published writer, who was signing books every year in his local supermarket, had, in fact never written anything. Both of his two books were, in fact, straight copies from bestsellers (one was from my friend, the other was from a classic French book) where only the names of the protagonists had been changed. The guy had been signing those book in his supermarket for 10 years until one of his readers realized that he had already read that book and was able to make the connection. Charges were dropped when it appeared that the local writer was clearly mentally ill (it seems he truly believed to have written those books).
Just to say that it doesn’t always make sense because, sometimes, there’s no sense to make.
For the anecdote, I had the same experience 22 years ago. My blog was quite young, and was propulsed by Dotclear (self-hosted, there was no Dotclear provider at the time)
FWIW, I had this happen to my blog back in the early 2010s, too. As far as I understood what was going on: back then, my blog was way more popular, and I had a half dozen posts or so that achieved genuine virality within tech. Not every post went big or anything (this predated Twitter, so I'd be mixing random little personal things in with the heavy-hitting tech ones), so viewership was inconsistent. This particular copycat would grab just the ones that were viral, then rehost them on their blog and share the link with an attempt to get their blog to be the canonical source for those articles. If that happened (it happened to one, which is how I found them in the first place), causing a traffic spike to their blog, they'd then cover that specific article with more ads than the Vegas strip. A lot of destroying my cred and copying my stuff so they'd get a few days of ad impressions.
While I had full proof, I unfortunately couldn't actually do anything directly about it, because they were on a hosting service in some random country we didn't have extradition or other legal agreements with. But I was able to convince Google that the site was scraping my content, and ultimately got a few of them dropped from the index. Once that happened enough times, they stopped copying my blog.
ploum | 12 hours ago
For the anecdote, I had the same experience 22 years ago. My blog was quite young, and was propulsed by Dotclear (self-hosted, there was no Dotclear provider at the time)
Readers pointed out another Dotclear blog that was using another theme (so totally not looking like mine) and which was copy/pasting my own posts but not all of them. As their was no LLM at the time, it looked like someone truly copy-pasted the posts they liked (there were the most personal ones). Also, my nickname had been removed to make it like the author was the one writing.
I don’t understand why someone wanted to do that but, today, it is even easier.
I have a similar anecdote in the book industry: a friend of mine, quite a famous writer, was warned by a reader that one of his book had been plagiarized.
It appeared that a very local, self-published writer, who was signing books every year in his local supermarket, had, in fact never written anything. Both of his two books were, in fact, straight copies from bestsellers (one was from my friend, the other was from a classic French book) where only the names of the protagonists had been changed. The guy had been signing those book in his supermarket for 10 years until one of his readers realized that he had already read that book and was able to make the connection. Charges were dropped when it appeared that the local writer was clearly mentally ill (it seems he truly believed to have written those books).
Just to say that it doesn’t always make sense because, sometimes, there’s no sense to make.
gecko | 11 hours ago
FWIW, I had this happen to my blog back in the early 2010s, too. As far as I understood what was going on: back then, my blog was way more popular, and I had a half dozen posts or so that achieved genuine virality within tech. Not every post went big or anything (this predated Twitter, so I'd be mixing random little personal things in with the heavy-hitting tech ones), so viewership was inconsistent. This particular copycat would grab just the ones that were viral, then rehost them on their blog and share the link with an attempt to get their blog to be the canonical source for those articles. If that happened (it happened to one, which is how I found them in the first place), causing a traffic spike to their blog, they'd then cover that specific article with more ads than the Vegas strip. A lot of destroying my cred and copying my stuff so they'd get a few days of ad impressions.
While I had full proof, I unfortunately couldn't actually do anything directly about it, because they were on a hosting service in some random country we didn't have extradition or other legal agreements with. But I was able to convince Google that the site was scraping my content, and ultimately got a few of them dropped from the index. Once that happened enough times, they stopped copying my blog.