3 ms·

I noticed this happening in other areas a few years ago, but with faked blogs. The titles and subjects would sound interesting, but then when you tried to read

by ksaj 5y ago

I noticed this happening in other areas a few years ago, but with faked blogs. The titles and subjects would sound interesting, but then when you tried to read them, you'd need a specialized decoder to get through the utterly baffling word replacements. But they already got their ad revenue by the time you notice the article is complete gibberish. The first one I found was about dog illnesses. They kept referring to dogs with phrases like "Your domesticated canine," and it was quite a chore trying to figure out most of the symptoms that they were listing. "Heart worms" was translated to "love snakes," which I thought was delightful.

dimatura 5y ago
Yes, this may be a specific example of a more widespread phenomenon. There's certain websites out there that republish articles from well-established publications (e.g., New York Times) almost word for word, except that they are rife with synonym swaps that may or may not make sense in context, presumably to escape some kind of automated copy detection. Results can be amusing. For example, the copied article said "“Drukqs” acquired a blended essential response..." where the original said "“Drukqs” received a mixed critical response...".
armchairhacker 5y ago
Nowadays too many real blogs are padded with weird phrasing and sentences which don't really mean anything. In this case, sometimes you get lucky and can actually find meaningful information between the padding. But sometimes you just read an article that takes 5 paragraphs and 500 words to say "we don't know".
_kst_ 5y ago
I've seen this kind of things in articles posted to social media sites (Quora and Facebook, but it probably exists elsewhere). I don't have a specific example at hand, but it's typically an article a few paragraphs long with really strange phrasing, so strange that it's not explainable by the author not knowing English well. In a handful of cases, I've managed to find the original source. Common phrases are systematically replaced by ill-fitting synonyms. I suspect the motivation is to avoid accusations of plagiarism (though I don't know what benefit the posters derive from doing this).

by ksaj 5y ago

dimatura 5y ago

Yes, this may be a specific example of a more widespread phenomenon. There's certain websites out there that republish articles from well-established publications (e.g., New York Times) almost word for word, except that they are rife with synonym swaps that may or may not make sense in context, presumably to escape some kind of automated copy detection. Results can be amusing. For example, the copied article said "“Drukqs” acquired a blended essential response..." where the original said "“Drukqs” received a mixed critical response...".

armchairhacker 5y ago

Nowadays too many real blogs are padded with weird phrasing and sentences which don't really mean anything. In this case, sometimes you get lucky and can actually find meaningful information between the padding. But sometimes you just read an article that takes 5 paragraphs and 500 words to say "we don't know".

_kst_ 5y ago

I've seen this kind of things in articles posted to social media sites (Quora and Facebook, but it probably exists elsewhere). I don't have a specific example at hand, but it's typically an article a few paragraphs long with really strange phrasing, so strange that it's not explainable by the author not knowing English well. In a handful of cases, I've managed to find the original source. Common phrases are systematically replaced by ill-fitting synonyms. I suspect the motivation is to avoid accusations of plagiarism (though I don't know what benefit the posters derive from doing this).