REI's HikingProject regurgitated my content • Hacker News Board

Re: REI's HikingProject regurgitated my content

#11

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 12:46 AM UTC

matt_the_bass wrote: post #6

myhikesorg wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same idea about the fake irrelevant data while trying to fall asleep last night. It's a great idea, but I also don't want to send any unwitting hiker or backpacker down the wrong route or include weird info that doesn't make sense - especially if someone gets lost on the trail and they're trying to decipher my trail notes. I have contacted REI and submitted takedown requests on Google and Bing as well, but…

Cool! As for “fake” info, I mean something like “look for the pink rocks next to the waterfall”. Something innocuous but you can point to to prove origin of their content. Also, I’m a big fan of “if you can’t best ‘em, join ‘em”. I’d try to work out a deal with them rather than just take down your content. Good luck!

[deleted]

Re: REI's HikingProject regurgitated my content

#12

Post by shanecleveland » Thu, Nov 07, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

Some good suggestions here: https://neilpatel.com/blog/find-remove-stolen-content/

I like the idea another comment had about including very detailed "trap" content. And then use the suggestion in the article to set up a google alert for it.

Re: REI's HikingProject regurgitated my content

#13

Post by myhikesorg » Fri, Nov 08, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

Update: Since I cannot edit the main post anymore, I figured I'd leave an update here.

I was able to speak with REI's AdventureProject's / HikingProject's content team and explained my side of the situation and they explained the content was user-submitted. They spend a lot of time and money dedicated to publishing content to make sure that it's not outright copying anything else. From what I could see in my database, REI had never been on that trail on MyHikes in the past, so the similar-looking data they published may have come from the user who added the trail. That user may have read the content on MyHikes and regurgitated it in HikingProject. I can certainly appreciate all of that since I have to sift through and process user-submitted trail notes as well, but I'm a team of 1 at a much smaller scale.

Their content team said they would remove the offending text that I felt was too close in relation to what I had wrote, which is a really cool response. They also mentioned they believe trail information should be available in multiple places for the hiking community - which I 100% believe in and is why I started MyHikes in the first place.

To wrap it up, I did not go down this road to try and take their content down just to keep a better rank - I truly felt like they had some information that had been ripped off and they were totally willing to change it to accommodate my concerns.