We all have to deal with plagiarism as bloggers. Some of us have had someone rip off our ideas while others have had people claim that a perfectly good idea has been copied to someone else’s blog. Let’s face it, most ideas in the blogging community are not unique! However, when someone is obviously copying your posts, creating the same weekly features and obviously clipping sentences from your work it can be a horrific experience.
I feel awful for those who are victims of plagiarism especially having personally experienced this frustrating situation.
The thing is that no one ever talks about is how this affects the smaller bloggers when they experience plagiarism. I almost quit blogging. I mean, who would believe that anyone would want to copy my ideas, right? I’m to inexperienced and unknown to be a victim of plagiarism. Yes, it happens to new and untested bloggers as well.
When someone I was friends with started copying a lot of my posts I found myself feeling alienated from the community. My content suffered because, frankly, my stuff wasn’t unique anymore and it was frustrating to see my ideas being celebrated on another, more popular blog. I worked for hours developing ideas, posts and images. I was excited to share my ideas and content with the world. Yet, within days this far popular blogger had posted something with the exact same message and it was..well..popular. My creativity crashed and burned.
I stopped creating content and my readership numbers fell while I hosted my own pity party.
I had a choice: I could continue to wallow and whine, or I could accept that a stronger blogger helped themselves to my work. I chose to persevere. They lack creativity and I lack the social media suave to become a heavy hitter. It doesn’t change the fact that someone liked my ideas enough to copy them, so I was doing something right, wasn’t I? I’m not in the position to do anything about it, but I am in a position to tell other minor bloggers that it can happen to us, too. You are not alone.
Look at it this way: someone ripped off your stuff? Well, I guess that means you’re doing something right. You’re creating content others wish they were creating and that’s sort of an ego booster, isn’t it?
Book blogging has a huge community with so many different people that often ideas overlap, but fighting over these ideas solves nothing. Let’s get back to supporting one another and stop giving plagiarizing goons all the power.
Sorry to hear this happened to you. I was only plagiarized recently, and as far as I know it was only one review. While I don’t consider myself to be a “big” blogger, I’ve been around four years and can at least expect some support from the community. I know I would have been absolutely devastated and overwhelmed if this had happened to me much earlier in my blogging career. I think, as a community, all we can really do is reassure people plagiarism is not ok, we will not tolerate it, and we’ll back up anyone who’s a victim.
Thanks for commenting! Yeah, plagiarism is a really annoying thing to see but it’s also part of writing public posts, I guess. I definitely find the community is supportive of victims of plagiarism and in general which is very different than what I’ve experienced in other online communities. My biggest concern about saying anything about someone using my ideas was that they were more popular than me and had become more established. I mean, I’m not as strong at the whole blogging thing or as well known so there’s always the concern that someone will see the overlap of posts and I’ll be labelled someone who plagiarizes. I kind just decided I don’t care.
It does make me sad so see people experiencing plagiarism, though. Even with my fears about overlapping posts ruining my image I agree that the community is doing a great job identifying the culprits and making each other aware..which is essential to combating the practice!