Between 2011 & 2012, I wrote a bunch of articles for HubPages. It seemed like a good idea at the time and I loved the community there. But it quickly became apparent that the company was just your same-old, run-of-the-mill content farm, making big bucks off of the time, energy, and talents of writers trying to supplement their incomes (but receiving only ever-decreasing pennies of their earning potentials for their efforts). When I stopped writing there, I relocated a bunch of my articles, mostly to Messages in the Moonlight. But I left quite a few there because they were specific to HubPages or I simply didn't have a home for them at the time.
I largely forgot about my intention to continue moving them, and let them sit because I was, well, kept very busy by Life being Life. But then HubPages started this thing with "sister sites" which are really just their attempt to reinvigorate their search rankings as Google algorithms improve to boost quality, non-content-farm information to the top. They moved one of my articles "What Wicca Is: An Answer in a Sea of Voices" to their site Exemplore and sent me an email to notify me of the edits they made.
The edits consisted of changing the title to something that was only accurate for a tiny chunk of the article as a whole (and very misleading as to what the article was), "fixing" the grammar of a single sentence so that it was entirely wrong (as would be easily recognized by anyone who knew anything of the subject at hand), and removing all links to additional information on the basis of not allowing self-serving links (the majority of the links were not any of mine and I certainly didn't benefit personally from listing them, yet all links were removed anyway).
Being the wise-ass that I am, I went back in and undid the changes they made. Sure enough, they did it again, this time leaving the title and that content of the article alone. They removed all links again, and specified in their email, again, that self-serving links were a no-no. Never mind that not all links pointed to any site of my own. Maybe had they only removed the link that was mine I'd have left it alone, but the way they removed all links, as though to ensure visitors did not go to anywhere that was not one of their own sites, I would have been like, "Okay, whatever." But that refusal to allow writers to link to high-quality content outside of the HubPages universe disgusted me too much to bare, so I unpublished all of my articles and deleted the ones specific to HubPages that will have no home elsewhere.
Over the coming months, I'll be re-homing the rest of my old articles. There's still a couple that may fit in with Messages in the Moonlight, but, for the most part, they'll probably be moving here. As such, I probably won't be posting a whole lot of newer material for awhile.
To keep track of the progress and how to find the relocated articles, see List of Evy's Redirected Articles.
Blessings,
Evy
