Playing a Writing Site; Sometimes it Works

There are people who are born scammers.  They’ll develop some kind of rip off so as to grab money.   Some get away with it for a long time.

At Hubpages, for years, certain ‘writers’ existed who brought the entire site under the umbrella of ‘Content Farm’.

They would create a ‘template’  of 1000 words.   It was the same garbage for article after article where the ‘Keywords’ were changed in a ‘Find & Replace’.

For example, they would write;  “Everyone is interested in KEYWORD.  All over the world people are talking about KEYWORD.   You have probably considered KEYWORD.  KEYWORD is nothing to be worried about. ”

On and on for 1000 words, saying nothing.   Each day they would replace KEYWORD with the trending topic, be it exercise, diabetes, diet, bicycle riding, pollution.

As they knew how to catch the eye of Search Engines; they would get thousands of hits.    They were Top Writers.    They made the most money, they were featured.  But their items said nothing.

Bubblews was another site people learned to play.  Knowing they’d be paid the 1st time, they’d join, spend the time liking, commenting, and post shards of already published items.   Once they reached the Payout, they’d put in, get it, and sit back and wait.

When the threshold changed they’d go back, check how much their previous published items have garnered, and then like and comment and post a few more shards, reach the 2nd payout under the new threshold, (assuming that the pay 1x rip the rest would have been reset correctly) get their 2nd payment, and sit on their hands until the site went down.

Hubpages; well they should have moderated the work and prevented empty articles.  Bubblews was created as a scam so there’s no sorrow that people could play them.

When a site pays for comments there needs to be a bit of alertness on the part of the owner or mod as this is an area not usually subject to any kind of checking.

A person can go from one article to another and paste 200 words of nothing over and over and over again and get the coin.

Some people are stupider than others and instead of creating a sensible ‘pattern’ such as; “I enjoyed this article very much.  It brought up some interesting points which I will consider…..”  going in that vein for 200 words and posting it (once) on every single published article on the site, so that each writer will receive the ‘gift’, they’ll stupidly squat in one article and post over and over again until caught.

Some sites are virtually flung to their deaths by ‘players’.

On Wikinut there was this gal who contacted a Mod, gave him a sob story about her being in a wheelchair or whatever, and then proceeded to post shard after shard of something she had posted elsewhere.

Unlike those who can take one item and break it into two or more substantial posts this gal simple chopped an article into pieces,  stuffed adverbs, adjectives and repetitions to reach the word requirement.

Reading her junk one had to balk; how could this be a featured article?   Of course the stupid Mod who’d been duped defended her until the site stopped paying.

Now there is a difference between writing a 1k or 2k item, and breaking it into five or more shorter items,  all of which have merit, and simply chopping.    You chop when you want to play a site, you rewrite and turn each shard into its own item when you are serious.

The reason Google got away with its Panda and Penguin, (two algorithms which were created to remove ‘Content Farms’ from their searches) was because so many writers noticed the crap that was being published on Hubpages and Triond and Wikinut and didn’t protest.

People didn’t know, at the time, that Google wanted to create a writing site but NOT PAY the writers, and thought by destroying writing sites the writers would flock to their sewer.

Had the Mods or Owners of Hubpages been more alert, realising that their ‘top writers’ were nothing but scammers, then they would have stepped in and the Panda and Penguin would have flopped.