🚨 Someone Stole My Writing Here and Reposted It Elsewhere 🚨
I am so incredibly angry right now that I'm on the verge of blurting out profanities.
As if I'm not having enough on my plate already – with a surgeon's appointment on Monday and already stressed as hell – the aftermath of having to take time to gather evidence and compose this post here and that post on Peakd, it is an undeserved burden for me, simply because someone decided to steal my work.
I’m so pissed off that I want to cry!
My story here has been blatantly plagiarized and reposted by another user. There's a thief among us here on the blockchain.
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I pour my heart and countless hours into my work, sharing deeply personal and unique experiences that anyone reading would instantly recognize as uniquely mine.
When it's stolen, it's not just a violation of intellectual property; it's an insult to my personal narrative and my life! It's a spit in the face.
This is my original post for Writing Prompts for FreeWriters on Steemit: Contest: Writing Prompts for FreeWriters
Published on Steemit on July 4, 2025, at 05:52 AM UTC, under my account @emmabritt.
This content has now been reposted on PeakD by the user named busiki on July 12, 2025, at approximately 6:37 PM UTC.
Plagiarized PeakD Post Link:
https://peakd.com/hive-161155/@busiki/never-look-down-on-writings
What's particularly ironic and infuriating is that their post was made in the Freewriters community on PeakD, just as mine was on Steemit.
They even used the tag "proof of brain." I have to ask: whose brain are they proving here? Certainly not their own, when they're using mine.
How dare they! I did not consent to this!
I kindly ask for your support, my Steemit friends, in addressing this:
-Please do not vote on the stolen content on Hive/PeakD if you are also on that site.
-If you can, please leave a comment on the plagiarized post to highlight that it's stolen content, linking back to my original Steemit post: https://steemit.com/freewriters/@emmabritt/35fv2s-contest-writing-prompts-for-freewriters.
-If it's not too much to ask, please share this post to alert our wider writing community about this incident and raise urgent awareness about content integrity. We need to watch out for each other!
I hope no one else has to experience the shock and disappointment of having their work brazenly stolen. Thank you for your understanding and support.
Note: I've also posted this on the Freewriters community on PeakD, and I've amended it to repost here. You guys might want to sweep somewhere to check if yours has been stolen too.
©Britt H.
I know you are sorry... It is a disappointing thing and it makes us very helpless. It happened to me once, a little over a year ago, and it was also at Hive.
At that time I was publishing in the extinct Taringa, it was good, but it lasted very little. There were good content creators and many, of the few of us who are left, are scattered between Steemit and Hive.
I'll tell you what happened: I wrote a reflection on the path of life and our legacy, inspired by the death of someone close to us. Many liked it, among whom there was a person with whom I had a lot of interaction, but someone who had joined in the last stage of that Social Network. After the closing of Taringa, I met Steemit, I already had an account in Hive, which I didn't use, because I didn't understand it. However, with everything I learned in my beginnings in Steemit, I decided to check again Hive and make some publications in a community called Reflections, my surprise is that there I find her, the user. I was encouraged, I read her new posts and I decided to review some of the old ones. My surprise was that there was my writing, slightly modified, but it was my writing, and it is something that we know just by seeing it and reading some lines, because we, the writers put part of us in those lines, our essence, and sometimes our soul. It's sad and upsetting, but just look ahead.... I'm sure that after being discovered the future of that user there will be very compromised.
At least you had to check it, I only had my notes, since what was on Taringa was lost, so I didn't even try to expose it.
I consider what you have done to be very brave.
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Stories like yours are very personal, especially when they're inspired by someone so close. For sure, you'll recognize that right away, unless it's a very general or technical post where some terms are used repeatedly; then you might give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm sorry that it happened to you too. These kinds of things are rampant, especially when there's a monetary motive involved. People don't hesitate to do such things.
For me, after I've cooled down, I'm feeling a little worried. I may have been too rushed to claim back my story because I didn't want to be accused of plagiarizing—that was my first thought. I may have exposed that profile, but we'll never truly know who that person is. I just hope they won't retaliate against me.
It's annoying, but unfortunately it happens and is difficult to prevent. I see that the post on PeakD has already been marked with "muted by community moderators" and the plagiariser is going away empty-handed.
Hopefully your anger will subside soon, because basically it speaks for the quality of your work, because shit usually doesn't get copied.
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Having to prove my work is original is the most annoying part of it all. But, as you put it, it's 'comforting' to know that my work isn't 'shitty' if someone bothered to copy it, haha!
On another note, there's a new issue where Hivewatcher is making negative remark about Steemit. I've been poring over the internet trying to understand why he would say such a thing.
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There's a lot of history there. Hive split off from Steem in 2020 after Steemit was acquired by The Tron Foundation. There was a lot of "bad blood" when it happened. Ever since then (and even before, to some degree), many central figures on the Hive chain - including hivewatchers - have been hostile towards Steem and Steemit.
They'll give lots of reasons why Steemit is bad and Hive is good, but IMO it all boiled down to the fact that they thought their influence here was being threatened by the acquisition. Before the acquisition, Steemit took a laissez faire approach to blockchain voting and governance, but the Hive faction was concerned that Tron wouldn't continue that strategy.
At the time, they claimed that the driving factors were over-centralization and the likelihood that Steem would be merged into the Tron (TRX) blockchain. However, their exit left both blockchains more centralized - not less.
5 years later, my best guess is that the Steemit/TRX partnership probably owns about 10-15% of the Steem ecosystem's value (down from maybe 25% in 2020), and Steem is still a standalone chain, so in retrospect it seems that both concerns were unfounded. But, the hard feelings remain.
Fair warning: When you solicit opinions on this topic (from either chain), be skeptical. It had a complicated history going all the way back to the Steem blockchain's launch, so most people (myself included) don't know all the factors that were really in play, and because of the "bad blood", not everyone is going to give you honest/objective feedback.
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I totally get it that personal opinions can be heavily tilted at times. With issues like this, it's much like a court case: even after a verdict of guilty or innocent, no one truly knows the entire truth, let alone in a situation like this.
What's more, as a new and low-level user, what am I supposed to do when they drop such a bomb in my lap with remarks like that? Take sides? I wasn't there, and that was so long ago. I'm neutral, and neither side has harmed me personally, though now I've had my own bad experience on PeakD. If there's a bad actor there, then what? Do I just direct my anger at the site itself?
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I wish I could give you advice about Hive (PeakD), but I haven't used it since the fork, so I'm totally out of touch. There are definitely some people who continued to use both chains, but I don't know how common that is or how successful they are.
I know of at least one person who has continued posting unique content on each platform, and I know of some others who post duplicate copies of the same posts on both platforms. In general, I think the person posting unique content in both places probably gets more voting support (but that could be wrong). That strategy is definitely more likely to protect you from downvotes from hivewatchers and others.
Personally, I don't think you should be forced to take sides, and I think most people on Steem would agree. On Hive, I think there are probably still some people who would pressure you to choose - as you're already starting to see. Some people here have actually been driven away from Hive by that sort of toxicity.
Anyway, at least I'm glad that the community over there addressed the post that had been copied from you.
As remlaps-lite already said, there was a split years ago. At that time, all existing Steem accounts were copied to Hive and the founders of Hive wanted to attract as many users as possible to their new chain and made negative remarks against Steem. The negative mindset has been maintained by some to this day, so I'm not surprised by the comment.
It wasn't a nice time and I'm quite glad that the fronts have calmed down, at least between the normal users.
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This feels much like when a country splits for whatever reason. Even when there's no conflict on the surface, there's usually a lingering tension, especially among those who were present during the split. It really shouldn't be an issue for the newer generation who weren't involved in the original events.
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Yes, that's a good comparison, it felt very similar.
The dust has settled for a while now, and with old friendships a difference of opinion about which chain would be better wasn't a problem anyway.
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What makes me a little perplexed is the following question: How were you able to discover this abuse so quickly?
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I have an account there, and I've been doing the writing prompts. I was logging in to check out the latest prompt and suddenly saw my own words. I thought I had mistakenly opened the Steemit tab. I still couldn't understand what was happening, so I clicked into the post. It turned out this person had copied my entire post and published it in the very community where I participate in writing prompts.
I would never have found out if I hadn't been on PeakD. That's why I quickly composed a post to reclaim my writing and also to warn others. I'm not sure how we're going to sweep or check for this, but I tried running my own post through a plagiarism checker, and it led back to my original links. I'm not sure if that's the most effective way to find other posts that might be stolen; it would mean I'd have to copy each of my posts to check, which would waste so much time.
Yeah, three hours was quite fast; most of my friends on Medium took a while, or never discovered it at all if not for fellow writers recognizing their work and informing them.
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For sure many of us do have the same experience, and what makes you believe it was a Steemian? You can easily have a look on Hive, just like everyone on Hive can have a look on Steemit! Every text and picture can be taken without any problem, the sites are not protected against taking copies.
If you want to put a complaint you have to go to Hive and not complaint here, sorry, but that's the fact. For sure there are Hive watchers who will act.
I am sorry it happened to you, you and I are just one out of many, The only proof you might have is that what you posted has an older date.
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I understand completely. I've seen it happen frequently on Medium, but I never expected it to happen to me.
I thought my sometimes odd writing, with its unconventional grammar and structure, to retain my raw thoughts—wouldn't be attractive to thieves; I assumed they'd only target the "really well-written" pieces.
Content theft is unavoidable, but the frustrating part is the burden of having to prove our work is original before we're mistakenly accused of being the plagiarizer.
As I mentioned, I'd already published this post on PeakD before bringing it here, to warn others to check if this happens to them too. The moderator has since muted that post, and a warning has been placed on the plagiarizer's other content.
While I have drafts saved on both my phone and email, I definitely need another platform that has detailed timestamping for my drafts. I'm looking at GitHub and Google Docs.
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