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Hubhopping; a mistake

On the writing site called Hubpages they had a thing called hubhopping. This was a practice in which contributors were invited to judge the work of other contributors. This sentence alone should send up flares.

But it didn’t.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwKaYku9mew" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source</a>

For years, the Admin allowed this practice, nay encouraged it.  Although one might say that this would help improve the site, that is not what it was used for.

The actual use of Hubhopping was to, get really good articles unfeatured. When an item is unfeatured it is Not visible.

<a href="https://hubpages.com/faq/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source</a>

Hence, when a hopper found that really good item, s/he would copy it to their own computer, vote down the article on Hubpages, get it unfeatured, then publish that plagiarised article under their own name on another site.

The Good Writer who had written that article, puzzled why it was unfeatured.  What was wrong with it?

Some would check the spelling, the grammar, rearrange a few words, and resubmit. Others would leave the site. Most of the really good writers left Hubpages.

Those who resubmitted would either be unfeatured again by the plagiariser, or, if the person who stole the article was not quick enough, the original writer would learn it had been rejected for plagiarism, and be directed to the  ‘original’ that is the item they wrote which another person captured.  Then, make the complaint.

For over six years Hubpages persisted in this policy, before realising what was happening.

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What do you think?

Written by jaylar

17 Comments

    • WAy back, Hubpages got 12 MIllion hits a month. It was one of the top online writing sites. You could easily make $50 a month. Getting 3k hits was no biggie.

      Then Google wanted to introduce a NON Paying site called Knol so tried to put other sites out of business by not turning them or their articles up on a search…so it you wrote an article about Atlantis on Hubpages titled “Did Atlantis Really Exist?” and I was searching and entered those exact words; I would NOT be directed to the article.

      Hubpages, thinking it was going to deal with poor writing invited its users to judge other writers.

      • Interesting, thanks for the Hubpage history. At nuime.com I was drawing marvelous ratings/# of readers, being paid somewhat ok, and then boom readers dropped and the whole site went down the toilet.

        Their system allowed anyone to join and post, whereby some posters gathering 100k or more readers in one day until they caught them. I’m unsure if they were paid, however, niume was weak in the ‘acceptance of new member’ department’ and obviously lacked moderation for new posters. I really enjoyed that site for 2 years and didn’t realize that they finally shut down and couldn’t retrieve some previous posts that I had written (my own fault).

        • I belonged to Niume and did expect it to do well. I don’t know what happened to it, I thought it was first quality… until it went down.

    • Oh yes. It is the story of Stephen King. He went on one of the sites… I don’t recall, using some Nick name. He posted something, and it was torn to ribbons, it was insulted on Reddit. He then deleted it, and put it into hard copy… and well… you know who Stephen King is.

      Those of us who had been alerted, we sat and just watched. We sat and saw it voted down, we saw the the stupid comment…(some good comments) and when it was Networked to REddit, the attacks were amazing… but none of us said a word.

      He let it stew for two full weeks.

      So this is the level of the ‘Net. And when you let people ‘judge’ your work, as Hub pages did, this is what happens.