What does it feel like to be stupid? An anonymous Quora user explains.
Meta:This, to me, is a fundamental problem with the Posterous culture.  Here we have a post on a Posterous blog made by a Posterous co-founder which copies, in its entirety and with no significant commentary, a work published elsewhere.It’s attributed with a link to the source — barely, in lowercased, tiny font, at the bottom. The headline is a link to the Posterous page, not the source (unlike Daring Fireball “linked list” items, for example).  How many people will actually follow the link?  Why is this Posterous blog entry #1 on HN when a permalink to the original source on Quora is readily available?Let’s be clear.  This is not “fair use.”  It’s not plagiarism, as Garry doesn’t claim he wrote the anecdote; but it’s a violation of copyright. It’s publishing without permission of the copyright holder.†My first submission to Hacker News was an original item I posted to my own website.  It got quite a few reads — but a lot of people were re-tweeting a link to a full copy of it hosted on someone else’s Posterous.  That user didn’t add much (A sentence expressing “me, too”).  I was conflicted: Glad people found my writing interesting enough to duplicate and share, but disappointed that they were reading it on someone else’s site for no good reason.I see now that if the company’s own bloggers consider copyright a joke, if they believe posting other people’s articles verbatim is kosher, well, can we be surprised their users do, too?(Postscript: This differs from Tumblr’s “re-blogging” in one important way: You only re-blog other Tumblr posts. “Re-blogging” is part of the Tumblr system. You expect it there if you post there. You don’t “lose” anything by it. I have no problem there.)† I don’t know if Quora’s terms of service mean that consent is implied, but honestly, in this case and this case only (the case of a Posterous employee), it doesn’t matter, because it’s about setting precedent for the community.