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Topic: Haptic - Plagiarizing Medium Article (essentially their WP)... with slight adjus (Read 226 times)

legendary
Activity: 2632
Merit: 1462
Yes, I'm an asshole
If you read the Medium article, instead of focusing on automated tool results, you will learn about the original ideas presented with the project. The mechanism is a spin-off of the Synthetix protocol, minus the synthetic assets part. The project earned an official mentorship from industry veterans, after several long sessions of direct talks with the team. We understand your focus on unveiling scams and projects that can be detrimental to the community in general, but Haptic is not one of those. We used a bit of rephrased text from the paper you mentioned, because it is particularly effective in describing the different kinds of AMM and that is not the focus of the document nor the work itself. The team is focused on development, follow our org on Github to keep track of our efforts.

If you care enough of your project as well as being properly mentored by an industry veteran, you'll consider to just take the essence of the said document that effectively describe different kind of AMM instead of blatantly copying them. I would question the knowledge you gained from this mentor if they allows (lest advise) you to use other people's work. Again, business ethic. As I've previously said here and there, I am a firm believer that there is a difference between "taking an idea from someone and made your own from it" and "stealing people's work".

But let's not dwell just on this matter, as I am sure it is rather a stalemate. You'll insist that you didn't do anything wrong while this forum would lean toward their well spoken official-unofficial rule of plagiarism. As you said that you're well mentored by an industry veteran, I am rather sure that veteran has informed you the importance of credibility, brand equity, trust, etc. as well? That's the business 101. So, I would humbly asked you to grace us with unveiling the team behind this project. If you're really serious with the project and has no intention to scam people, you're certainly wouldn't mind to be doxxed in exchange to gain some of people's trust?
copper member
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
LOL. Elysian Finance is also involved in this shady scheme? Both project had bounties under julerz12 management, and after this topic, they suddenly got some issues with manager. Both projects are caught violating rules. To me this is enough to tag as “better avoid”, if such childish problems already appear on such early stage. Futher it goes, worse it will be.

From what I can gather, julerz12 took a swift and justified decision by withdrawing himself from a project under an active accusation the instance it came to his awareness. On his defense (stated on his bounty group) it's against his policy to works with questionable ethic that's violate forum rules: plagiarism. And I'll have to strongly agree with this decision, it's an even more questionable ethic for a BM if they continue on working with a project that's proven to violate forum rule. Far as I know, julerz12 is more than willing to re-cooperate once the accusation cleared --which, by the way, I think we have to be satisfied with the classic final words of the defeated, "If you want to insist with your narrative, go ahead." because Haptic didn't give their rebuttals even though they're online today, I'll wait for two more days before concluding that they admit the plagiarism and tagging their account.

In retaliation to this, Elysian Finance --the same dev with Haptic-- kicked him out from their contract by reason that julerz12 unilaterally terminate his employment with Haptic. Ironically, they themsleves were unilaterally terminate their contract with the BM. On their defense, they tried to negotiate with julerz12 but couldn't meet at middle point. From julerz12 side, there's not much of a negotiations. I think we can judge which side is true to their words, given one side deleted their statement immediately.

I would love to do a DD on Elysian, but given their published documents are beyond minimal, and their website didn't contain anything that can be researched --which, those characteristics itself speaks volumes of the quality of their project-- there's not much I can do to prove whether the project worth investing or not, although i leaned toward the later.

If you read the Medium article, instead of focusing on automated tool results, you will learn about the original ideas presented with the project. The mechanism is a spin-off of the Synthetix protocol, minus the synthetic assets part. The project earned an official mentorship from industry veterans, after several long sessions of direct talks with the team. We understand your focus on unveiling scams and projects that can be detrimental to the community in general, but Haptic is not one of those. We used a bit of rephrased text from the paper you mentioned, because it is particularly effective in describing the different kinds of AMM and that is not the focus of the document nor the work itself. The team is focused on development, follow our org on Github to keep track of our efforts.

legendary
Activity: 2632
Merit: 1462
Yes, I'm an asshole
LOL. Elysian Finance is also involved in this shady scheme? Both project had bounties under julerz12 management, and after this topic, they suddenly got some issues with manager. Both projects are caught violating rules. To me this is enough to tag as “better avoid”, if such childish problems already appear on such early stage. Futher it goes, worse it will be.

From what I can gather, julerz12 took a swift and justified decision by withdrawing himself from a project under an active accusation the instance it came to his awareness. On his defense (stated on his bounty group) it's against his policy to works with questionable ethic that's violate forum rules: plagiarism. And I'll have to strongly agree with this decision, it's an even more questionable ethic for a BM if they continue on working with a project that's proven to violate forum rule. Far as I know, julerz12 is more than willing to re-cooperate once the accusation cleared --which, by the way, I think we have to be satisfied with the classic final words of the defeated, "If you want to insist with your narrative, go ahead." because Haptic didn't give their rebuttals even though they're online today, I'll wait for two more days before concluding that they admit the plagiarism and tagging their account.

In retaliation to this, Elysian Finance --the same dev with Haptic-- kicked him out from their contract by reason that julerz12 unilaterally terminate his employment with Haptic. Ironically, they themsleves were unilaterally terminate their contract with the BM. On their defense, they tried to negotiate with julerz12 but couldn't meet at middle point. From julerz12 side, there's not much of a negotiations. I think we can judge which side is true to their words, given one side deleted their statement immediately.

I would love to do a DD on Elysian, but given their published documents are beyond minimal, and their website didn't contain anything that can be researched --which, those characteristics itself speaks volumes of the quality of their project-- there's not much I can do to prove whether the project worth investing or not, although i leaned toward the later.
legendary
Activity: 2478
Merit: 1492
LOL. Elysian Finance is also involved in this shady scheme? Both project had bounties under julerz12 management, and after this topic, they suddenly got some issues with manager. Both projects are caught violating rules. To me this is enough to tag as “better avoid”, if such childish problems already appear on such early stage. Futher it goes, worse it will be.
legendary
Activity: 2632
Merit: 1462
Yes, I'm an asshole
Like we mentioned, the Medium article is only a surrogate of the original publication, which hasn't been shared publicly yet. We are big fans of the paper mentioned and references will be clear (and due) on the final publication. We never meant to elude plagiarism detectors by employing the writing style you see throughout the Medium article. Again, we acknowledge that some parts are very similar to the document you mention as a reference, the scope of which is to describe the mathematical properties of various existing AMM algorithms. Haptic is about reducing the impact of impermanent loss, and we produced plenty of original content and smart contract code. Our Twitter account exists since a while, but the project was conceived last summer and we started developing it under the #L222 mentorship program,during January 2022.
[...]

Allow me to also quote the sentence referred as "like we mentioned" to give a clear picture

Our Medium launch article is a shortened version of our upcoming whitepaper, which is heavily influenced by the academic literature and references it properly.

To make it clear, you're saying that the content of your medium will be on your final WP as well... or in other words, the content that exactly plagiarize content from the paper referenced above will be on your whitepaper?

In addition, here is a report from Grammarly.com:



Anything less than 15% is within perfectly reasonable usage.  If you want to insist with your narrative, go ahead.

I am not a paid member of grammarly, so the plagiarism checker is rather inaccessible for me. If any, the result I got actually works against your favor as grammarly --the plagiarism checker you prefer to defend yourself-- define your document as "significantly plagiarized"



But please amuse us, if we have to go your way, does the 8% detected includes the parts that you've tailored to make a slight difference --i.e.: the word "2020" to "2021", or removing two or three words in several sentences-- or you've been kind and fair enough to re-adjust those tailored parts to match the corresponding parts on the original document? Please note that when I said "tailored" it doesn't mean you paraphrasing them by taking the essence of the paragraph and sentences and turn them into your own, you rather --as I said previously-- selectively redacted one or two sentences, or if we may borrow tbct_mt2's words, a fake paraphrasing.

I somewhat think the percentage will be much higher than 8%.

Although... in the other hand, it does not really matters. If you deemed copying something from someone else by a reason --you type and I quote-- "Anything less than 15% is within perfectly reasonable usage.", I think you're in a serious need to run a course on business ethic. I would also suggest you to familiarize with the list of forum's unofficial-official rules, I've nicely selected and highlighted some of them which specifically talking about plagiarism:

[...]
These are the most common rule violations that newbies make. There are other rules than these.

  • Plagiarism: If you copy some text from somewhere, then you should have a good reason for it, and you must link to the source. Doing otherwise is plagiarism. Changing a few words around doesn't matter. If we find that you plagiarized, then you absolutely will be permanently banned, even if we find it years after you did it.
[...]

Theymos' insight on plagiarism:

In general, I'm all for being lenient. There are users who have been temp banned many times but still haven't been permabanned because their contributions outweigh their misbehavior. I actively disbelieve in the idea of a "rule of law" where hard rules exist and are strictly applied across the board as if we're all robots. Every case should be considered individually in the context of the forum's mission.

Plagiarism is what gets people permabanned, not just copying. Plagiarism is copying with the intent of passing the work off as your own. In essentially all cases, plagiarism deserves a permaban because it usually proves definitively that the person is here for the wrong reasons: to fill up space in order to get paid, not to actually discuss or contribute. If someone was able to convince us that they were plagiarizing just to eg. impress people rather than to fill up space, then a lesser ban of a few months might instead be warranted. But this has never happened AFAICR. (Arguments based on plausible deniability aren't going to work; we don't need to prove that you had the motive we see in your actions.)

If you treat posting as a job, a chore, then you must live in fear, since the forum is not made for you. In this case, you need to blend in as someone who actually cares, but plagiarism will immediately out you, and producing a mountain of useless posts will also eventually be noticed, if more slowly. If you do actually care, then this will be obvious in your posts (and probably your merit score), and you will have nothing to fear from moderators; even allegations of plagiarism will be doubted when seen in the context of your other posts.

Quote
in extreme cases could be copyright theft?

Plagiarism is almost always a copyright violation which could conceivably get the poster in a lot of trouble, but it's not a bigger legal issue for the forum than anything else. (Using the forum to violate copyright is never allowed, though.)

Quote
when copying and pasting from the net can it lower google rankings? and internal copy and past could do the same thing?

That's not a particular concern of mine.

Quote
even memes may soon constitute copyright theft

Only in the EUSSR.

Or, if we want to go somewhere more worldwidely accepted, the Merriam-Webster's definition of plagiarism

Definition of plagiarize

transitive verb
: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

intransitive verb
: to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

If your intention is truly just to make a summary of a more complex document --which, in it, also includes the content on the summary, i.e. the plagiarized content-- I can't see why can't you cite the source on medium. You literally just need to add a sentence stating this on the lower part of your article. For me, this action is more to a caught-red-handedly copying a material than submitting a paper that's heavily influenced and inspired by a document you've been a big fan of.



Talking about WP... this is a separate topic yet related to your case. Long story short, upon submitting this accusation thread, a little bird (if we may call a reputable member of this forum as a "little bird") tipped me to look at a project called "Elysian Finance" who openly admitted that they share the same dev as your project. Interestingly, this project were once violated forum rules too, just like you violate the plagiarizing rule. On their case, it seems they tried to incentivizing post. And, just like you, they also decide --and somehow seemingly rather proud of-- to be anonymous as well as having a bare minimum website.

Now, for the WP, they promised to deliver a WP "some time later". True to their words, they took "later" rather seriously as it's been more than one and a half months and they are yet to deliver the document, and it is worth mentioning that their fair launch is in... two weeks! Oh dear Lucifer, it almost seems like they're not planning to give anyone adequate time to read and do research on their WP before the launch. Red flag. Red flag. Anon team? Also red flag. Shared the same team with a project that plagiarize document? Umm... black flag?



Funnily, they later removed this self confessions through edit

copper member
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
Hello,

We appreciate the investigative work done by the community and we think it's very important to maintain a clean ecosystem. Our Medium launch article is a shortened version of our upcoming whitepaper, which is heavily influenced by the academic literature and references it properly. Some phrasing might be directly inspired by the influential "the Homogenous Properties of Automated Market Makers". Our presence on Telegram,  as we only have an announcement channel.  Our main focus is on Discord.  General lack of information is due to the fact that the project is in its early phase. We are available to clarify any misunderstanding.


At least you admitted and acknowledge that the article is written by yourself and you have ful awareness of the content, it's not the work of a freelancer who copy and paste articles without your knowledge etc. etc.

With that established, that you deliberately copied the content, two things that I think we can all agree. One, it's a --probably written somewhere-- rule that plagiarizing content is heavily frowned upon on this forum. The scam accusation board filled with these cases and most of them didn't ends well as most project who plagiarized contents from others would ends up as scam. It breaks down to the fact that if you really serious wit your project, you'll put efforts on it. Tl;dr: you won't plagiarize.

Two, i think anyone that ever had the privilege to get a higher education would know there is a difference(s) on "heavily influenced" and "intentionally copying". A project that's heavily influenced by older project could have the same theme or same features, but it doesn't mean they'll have the same wording. Your project, however, seemingly to deliberately change wordings, delete and remove a section or two --read: extremely poorly paraphrasing-- to make it rather difficult for plagiarism checker to find the similarities.

As for your claim that your project is in early phase, allow me to bring "exhibit F", a screenshot fromy our twitter page showing your account has been created since almost one year ago and publishes tweets in November. Were you saying that after one year, not only you're failed to make a significant milestone worth announcing and a website with adequate info, you also could only publish a paper which steal, oops... i mean "influenced by" content from a published article without even giving the authors credits? How is this showing credibility?



Like we mentioned, the Medium article is only a surrogate of the original publication, which hasn't been shared publicly yet. We are big fans of the paper mentioned and references will be clear (and due) on the final publication. We never meant to elude plagiarism detectors by employing the writing style you see throughout the Medium article. Again, we acknowledge that some parts are very similar to the document you mention as a reference, the scope of which is to describe the mathematical properties of various existing AMM algorithms. Haptic is about reducing the impact of impermanent loss, and we produced plenty of original content and smart contract code. Our Twitter account exists since a while, but the project was conceived last summer and we started developing it under the #L222 mentorship program,during January 2022.

In addition, here is a report from Grammarly.com:



Anything less than 15% is within perfectly reasonable usage.  If you want to insist with your narrative, go ahead.
legendary
Activity: 2632
Merit: 1462
Yes, I'm an asshole
Hello,

We appreciate the investigative work done by the community and we think it's very important to maintain a clean ecosystem. Our Medium launch article is a shortened version of our upcoming whitepaper, which is heavily influenced by the academic literature and references it properly. Some phrasing might be directly inspired by the influential "the Homogenous Properties of Automated Market Makers". Our presence on Telegram,  as we only have an announcement channel.  Our main focus is on Discord.  General lack of information is due to the fact that the project is in its early phase. We are available to clarify any misunderstanding.


At least you admitted and acknowledge that the article is written by yourself and you have ful awareness of the content, it's not the work of a freelancer who copy and paste articles without your knowledge etc. etc.

With that established, that you deliberately copied the content, two things that I think we can all agree. One, it's a --probably written somewhere-- rule that plagiarizing content is heavily frowned upon on this forum. The scam accusation board filled with these cases and most of them didn't ends well as most project who plagiarized contents from others would ends up as scam. It breaks down to the fact that if you really serious wit your project, you'll put efforts on it. Tl;dr: you won't plagiarize.

Two, i think anyone that ever had the privilege to get a higher education would know there is a difference(s) on "heavily influenced" and "intentionally copying". A project that's heavily influenced by older project could have the same theme or same features, but it doesn't mean they'll have the same wording. Your project, however, seemingly to deliberately change wordings, delete and remove a section or two --read: extremely poorly paraphrasing-- to make it rather difficult for plagiarism checker to find the similarities.

As for your claim that your project is in early phase, allow me to bring "exhibit F", a screenshot fromy our twitter page showing your account has been created since almost one year ago and publishes tweets in November. Were you saying that after one year, not only you're failed to make a significant milestone worth announcing and a website with adequate info, you also could only publish a paper which steal, oops... i mean "influenced by" content from a published article without even giving the authors credits? How is this showing credibility?

copper member
Activity: 8
Merit: 0
What happened: Plagiarizing their published Medium article which essentially works as their mini whitepaper

Scammers Profile Link: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/hapticfinance-3453444
Scammers Website: https://haptic.finance/ | archived
Scammers ANN thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/anndefi-haptic-increase-capital-efficiency-and-reduce-impermanent-loss-5390207 | archived
Plagiarized Documents: medium page | archived
Original source: "The Homogenous Properties of Automated Market Makers"

Additional notes:

They seems to prefer discord as their means of communication. Being not a discord guy myself, I can't check how's the discussion happened there. Their official telegram is effectively non functional with zero update since the creation date, though. Same fate happened to their website which literally lacking of any useful info. No company profile, no team, just a page listing their social media.


Edit: notifying and inviting dev through their ann thread

Hello,

We appreciate the investigative work done by the community and we think it's very important to maintain a clean ecosystem. Our Medium launch article is a shortened version of our upcoming whitepaper, which is heavily influenced by the academic literature and references it properly. Some phrasing might be directly inspired by the influential "the Homogenous Properties of Automated Market Makers". Our presence on Telegram,  as we only have an announcement channel.  Our main focus is on Discord.  General lack of information is due to the fact that the project is in its early phase. We are available to clarify any misunderstanding.


legendary
Activity: 2632
Merit: 1462
Yes, I'm an asshole
What happened: Plagiarizing their published Medium article which essentially works as their mini whitepaper

Scammers Profile Link: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/hapticfinance-3453444
Scammers Website: https://haptic.finance/ | archived
Scammers ANN thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/anndefi-haptic-increase-capital-efficiency-and-reduce-impermanent-loss-5390207 | archived
Plagiarized Documents: medium page | archived
Original source: "The Homogenous Properties of Automated Market Makers"

Additional notes:

They seems to prefer discord as their means of communication. Being not a discord guy myself, I can't check how's the discussion happened there. Their official telegram is effectively non functional with zero update since the creation date, though. Same fate happened to their website which literally lacking of any useful info. No company profile, no team, just a page listing their social media.


Some screenshot for easy view:

]












Edit: notifying and inviting dev through their ann thread
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