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I tracked down my impostor

theguardian.com

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Re: I tracked down my impostor

#171

Post by parsimo2010 »

Qub3d wrote: post #169
parsimo2010 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect that in my lifetime there will be (or already has been) an imposter that gets a leg up on someone in this way and pulls it off- “no, I wrote the article first, they stole it from me and published it. Here are my drafts which predate their submission. Fire them, not me.”

As the imposter this is a really dangerous gambit, though. If it succeeds, and that person stops doing academic work, who does the imposter plagiarize from?

I suppose they would have to find someone else to plagiarize if they wanted to continue their con. I don’t think an impostor would set out to do this, they would prepare it as a backup plan in case they were discovered. At that point it’s dangerous, but the alternative is to give up and confess. That would make it seem like a worthy last ditch effort. Maybe if they pull it off they aren’t interested in sustaining the con long term, but rather just enough to solidify their gains and move on to something else.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#172

Post by nomdep »

macintux wrote: post #51
nomdep wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole story probably isn't true or it has been grossly exagerated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26604886

Aha! So the reason he didn't file a police report was: "He never actually claimed to be me, he just stole all my moves" https://twitter.com/mattlodder/status/1350379466313396224

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#173

Post by aiisjustanif »

rriepe wrote: post #170
N00bN00b wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's a narcissist and I'm saying that as a narcissist myself. That fragile ego basically means narcissists are afraid of humiliation. On top that, mentally everything is build around shoring up my ego to compensate for the low self esteem. My ego. Not someone else's ego. I'd have to do some really weird mental gymnastics to be satisfied with copying someone else's work, that would just lower my ego even more.…

> The narcissistic self deception is involuntary Self-aware narcissists are pretty rare too. Can you e-mail me? Info in profile.

What evidence is there that it is rare?

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#174

Post by dredmorbius »

livre wrote: post #143
okamiueru wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Do you know what the marked value is for karma? Is the value tied to something practical, e.g. easier to pass spam filters with an account?

Many subreddits automatically delete posts or comments from users with low karma. Also people trust users with older accounts and a good amount of karma more than new users or people with low karma.

Keep in mind this is either a subreddit or Automoderator setting.

Subs can limit posts to users with some minimal karma or age. Typically this still permits comment, though harvesting comment karma is then incentivised.

Automoderator, a rule-driven automated moderation tool, can actively interact with posts and comments based on various criteria, including automatically holding or removing posts or comments, messaging submitters, and other actions. This is heavily used on highly-active subs, and pretty well documented.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#175

Post by tkgally »

dylan604 wrote: post #53
jonnat wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter is in 5th grade, attending school virtually due to the pandemic, and she has all her submitted assignments automatically verified by plagiarism checkers. In fact, she's encouraged to use online plagiarism checkers herself before submission to avoid false positives.

It's been a minute since I was in 5th grade. I'm trying to remember what kind of assignments I would have had where I could have plagiarized something that would not have been immediately obvious to the teacher.

My mother was a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher in California fifty years ago. She would sometimes have her students write stories, and once one girl turned in a delightful little story that stood out from the others. My mother thought she showed real talent and praised her to the skies, showed the story to other teachers, brought it home and showed it to our family, etc. A year or two later, my mother happened across exactly the same story in a children’s book in the library. It was clear that the girl had just copied her story out of the book. My mother was really sad about the whole thing for quite a while.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#176

Post by N00bN00b »

rriepe wrote: post #170
N00bN00b wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it's a narcissist and I'm saying that as a narcissist myself. That fragile ego basically means narcissists are afraid of humiliation. On top that, mentally everything is build around shoring up my ego to compensate for the low self esteem. My ego. Not someone else's ego. I'd have to do some really weird mental gymnastics to be satisfied with copying someone else's work, that would just lower my ego even more.…

> The narcissistic self deception is involuntary Self-aware narcissists are pretty rare too. Can you e-mail me? Info in profile.

Here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/narcissism/comments/mde5fh/biweekly...

It's my post/sub. You're free to dig in my history and/or DM me.

And of course there are plenty more self aware narcissists to hang out with as well.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#177

Post by personlurking »

kfoley wrote: post #6

Reminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. I posted a comment on HN in response to some article about Emacs. Later that day I saw someone had copied my comment word for word in reply to the same article on Reddit. I still have no idea why someone would do that. I thought at first it was some kind of karma farming operation but the post history of the Reddi…

I used to have a niche blog that was an off-shoot of a more popular blog I did within the same general area of knowledge. I would put in many, many hours doing deep dives into foreign historical archives and translating what I found into English for my niche blog.

I would also read any MSM news in English that came out about the general topic. I would often find pieces of my research inserted into these articles, by different outlets and different authors. Never any credit given. Sometimes the entire article was centered around something I'd uncovered, and published 4-5 days after posting it in my blog.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#178

Post by sjfidsfkds »

whatshisface wrote: post #98
DoubleGlazing wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happened to a friend of mine. He'd posted an article on a website devoted to a specific form of fluid dynamics discussion. This was a site with less than 50 active users. Someone submitted the article (edited to sound more academic) to a journal - and with extra authors added. The journal almost published it, but they didn't because at the last minute one of their reviewers felt they recognized the content as having…

Reminds me of something I experienced on HN and Reddit, though my case was a far less significant level. There was a Reddit bot a few years ago (aptly named 'trappedinreddit') that would automatically post the previous top comment on reposts. I bet it was Reddit internal bots. That process is an order of magnitude faster on Reddit than control-v.

> I bet it was Reddit internal bots.

This is a compelling idea, but I think they wouldn’t be so obvious about it.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#179

Post by N00bN00b »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #173
rriepe wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The narcissistic self deception is involuntary Self-aware narcissists are pretty rare too. Can you e-mail me? Info in profile.

What evidence is there that it is rare?

I'd say it's fairly rare. Most therapists often won't diagnose patients, because it's considered not helpful to the trust relationship and trying to make someone that's narcissistic understand that they are narcissistic is... Hard, because of the splitting and the disconnect between the internal self image and the external presentation.

They'll often mirror or turn it back on you and there's not much you can say at that point ("I'm a narcissist? No! You are a narcissist!"). It's a tricky disorder.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#180

Post by lazyasciiart »

analog31 wrote: post #167
mkl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they retain a copy; that's part of how they detect plagiarism. It's been ruled fair use in the US [1], and if it hadn't it would be in the terms and conditions. You can opt out of retention on TurnItIn, but it's the default. [1] https://www.turnitin.com/blog/top-15-misconceptions-about-tu...

Does it satisfy FERPA? If my paper were in their database, and all or part of it was revealed to another student in the process of claiming a match, that would be a violation of my FERPA rights.

Only if it was personally identifiable.
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