Prologue
I have a blog, Code4IT.dev, where I publish content mainly related to .NET.
On April I started writing an article about Enums in C#: it's a small topic, so it was hard to find good ideas to create a complete and interesting article.
In the end, while doing researches I learned more than I expected, so I split the article in 2 parts:
5 things you didn't know about enums in C# and 5 more things about enums in C#
It took me about 8 hours to write, correct, publish, share etc those articles, and I'm proud of it.
An unexpected event
Today on Twitter a bot shared an article called 5 Things You Should Know About Enums in C#. It reminds me of something! Let me read it...
Yes, that was a copy of my article! Someone (a guy called David S) just changed the name of the Enum used as example, and changed some words.
Come on, if you have to copy, do it better!š
Action
Time for revenge! Or better, public shaming!
I retweeted his article, and I congratulated him for his copycat skills.
Yes, at the time of writing I'm disguising as a woman. I'm running an experiment, so in 3 weeks I'll be back to my normal form.
Of course he deleted the original tweet and changed his username.
So, I retweeted my previous tweet asking him to at least delete MY article
Conclusion
He finally did it.
Even if the link still appears in the navigation, my article is no longer visible.
He didn't apologize, but just delete my article is enough for me!
Final words
It takes effort to come up with new ideas, organize and write them down. I was really upset about this situation.
Personally I write articles for fun, because it's a way for me to learn and to share useful (I hope) content with others.
I'm really, REALLY happy when I receive feedbacks: also, if you find something interesting that you want to talk about in your blog, I'm happy to know that I had a very little part in someone else's life.
But please, don't copy-paste to your blog! Learn, rework, link to the source, put something of you in your articles!
Have you ever had a similar experience?
Top comments (3)
Iām curious about the findings of your experiment, have you written it down somewhere?
Yep, just a Tweet.
It went better than expected: the number of new followers was the same as when I was "me": this means that people are interested in what you say rather than who you are.
Reminded me of Shakespeare's As You Like It :-)