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Hung Vu
Hung Vu

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🤯 Does Hackernoon team manually edit user article to inject crypto advertisement? [Updated]

To moderators: If this is not a right place to ask, please feel free to remove this post.


Update 1

A Hackernoon editor reached out to me and let me know there was an error on their auto TLDR generated system, so my TLDR was inserted incorrectly. My article was amended. To quote:

There appears to have been an error with a feature that we use to generate TL;DRs that inserted the incorrect text.

I did scan over 50+ article to see if there are similar situations. Then found some that the TLDR has no connection to the article, such as below. Certainly, I cannot say whether it was intended by the article author or resulted from a bug on Hackernoon system.

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However, an issue regarding unrelated references or tags like crypto coins and companies is fairly widespread. Press on TLDR, or look at the bottom of the article, and you will notice them. If these are bugs, hopefully these will be fixed down the road.


Original post

Hackernoon is one of place to occasionally cross-post my article. However, there are a few things that I notice:

  1. Sometimes they dropped my canonical link I had to manually edit afterward.
  2. But it seems like an edit button is removed now? Or at least moved to some non-trivial location? At least for now, I cannot find a way to make changes to my article.
  3. The TLDR became a place to inject crypto advertisement (by editor or some automated system I suppose?).
  4. There are many references pointing to crypto materials, even though the article is not related at all.

What do you think?

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Top comments (5)

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codenameone profile image
Shai Almog

I sure hope this isn't the case. I don't have time to review all my articles, I did delete one where they changed the title to something ridiculous.

The amount of crypto nonsense they peddle is really annoying.

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

They did the same on some of my old articles, but at different degrees though.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

The whole bitcoin/blockchain sector has apparently made the decision that ethics do not matter.

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hunghvu profile image
Hung Vu

Althogh I'm not into crypto, I'm fine with their strong appearance on the site. I can simply ignore them. However, editing other articles to inject crypto ad like this seems a bit too much. This can potentially lead the readers to misunderstand article authors.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

I agree with you, it's misleading and they shouldn't do that.

I'm just addi that it's alas not even in the top 25 shadiest things that happen in the crypto world.

Last month for example I received some telegram spam talking about buying things in Bitcoin. I was intrigued because almost nobody use Bitcoin to buy things. It turned out to be some fucktard selling private photos of underage girls. Obviously I immediately reported the dude.

But the predominant crypto ethic regarding those bad actors they enable seems to be "not my problem, I'm just working on the technology, I'm just following orders".