hough it solved one problem (stagnation of read.cash), it brought a new problem: the spam....
Obviously, when you tell people "Hey, we're going to pay you for articles", all that some people can hear is: "Hey, they're paying for letters, let's just find a good source of letters to copy from". So, they start producing trash content at a break-neck pace.
Well, we've tried building a system that detects if an article (or rather its parts) appears somewhere on the Web. That definitely solved the problem with copied content, but also that led to unending string of fights with authors (public here on read.cash, on Reddit and in our inbox, Twitter, everywhere) who wanted to publish their content in many places at the same time. (I don't really see the point in that, but OK)
One proposed solution was to leave only the "OC" (Original Content) mark if the content is detected as exclusive and do nothing if content is not original. We thought about it, but it didn't seem like a solution at all. I mean that won't stop any spammers.
You have to understand that these people aren't bad per se, they just want to earn money and don't know of any better way, so they copy articles or comments in hopes of getting paid.
Our big goal of course is to channel their energy into something more productive, but so far the only thing we can try to do is to stop them, because spam prevents read.cash fund from growing (no, seriously, that's not a guess or something, we know for sure that it can be bigger, but not with that amount of spam).