The phrase “cheaters never prosper” gives me nostalgic memories of the first time a classmate was caught peeking at one of my tests. All kinds of cheating goes on in the world, and often goes unpunished. Folks cheat on their taxes, on their wives, in a poker game, in sports, on the road. All for some obvious benefit.
Where I don’t understand it is in the social world - particularly, plagiarizing blog posts and technical articles. I’m not going to completely re-hash it because it has been done over and over again.
A few weeks ago it was Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) calling out John “SQLTech2″ Dunleavy and demanding that he take down all of his “borrowed” content. Brent’s blog post generated a lot of traffic and some heated words, and I even interacted with John on twitter - where he was very adamant that he didn’t see the problem with what he was doing, and even started throwing baseless accusations the other way. He did ultimately take down the stolen content, and was humbled by Paul Randal (blog | twitter) who took him offline and told him a thing or two about community. But overall the conclusion is that stealing blog content and passing it off on your own just doesn’t pay off.
Yesterday, it was a different blogger (Kaustav Kumar Mishra) on http://www.hyderabadtechies.info/ who was stealing articles from Paul White (twitter), among others. Unlike in John’s case, the blogger doesn’t own the site, and the admin was easy to convince that the content was questionable at best - and it was removed promptly. In fact, it seems they removed ALL of the content.
So what are these content thieves expecting to gain from this behavior? Popularity? Fooling others into believing they are smarter than they really are? Yes, you can fool your way through an interview and land a job. But how long can you last at the job when the interview was smoke and mirrors, and now you’re really expected to implement the solution using the technology you convinced them you were a subject matter expert in?
Unlike the term paper you plagiarized in your freshman history course, today the advent of tools like twitter means your calling out will spread like wildfire. In a lot of cases, you’ll need to consider changing your name and moving, because by the time you realize you’ve been caught, every employer you could dream of working for has probably already read about it - and if not, a quick search will find the discussion.
A recent parallel in real life: I play pub trivia every Wednesday night here in Rhode Island. We have a good team core, always come up with a funny team name (most would be inappropriate to repeat here), and we finish in the money (top 3) 8 times out of 10. Now, the prizes are not huge - a $30 gift certificate at the hosting pub for first place, $20 for second, and $10 for third. With a team of 5 or 6, even winning first place means the certificate covers a beer each - it’s more about bragging rights. So I’m not sure what drives people to come to a place like this, and cheat by searching for the answers on their smart phone hidden in their lap. Do they feel good about this? Why bother playing? Searching the Internet for the answer defeats the purpose of the game, and is horribly unsportsmanlike. I am proud to say that on some nights we win in spite of other teams having an obvious advantage, such as this past week when we observed a particular team named “Roger Rabbit” using a phone to find the answers. Their downfall, which led to a third place finish: not every obscure trivia question is easily answered by Google.
So what is my point? Well, the phrase “Cheaters never prosper” is not entirely true. Some cheaters do prosper, because they never get caught. But cheating socially is just a bad idea - you will be found out, and the consequences will almost certainly outweigh the benefits (perceived or real).
Aaron Bertrand
Senior Data Architect, OTOlabs
http://www.otolabs.com
Tags: cheating, Community, plagiarism, Social Media, Technology, twitter
