Its really quite ironic that this article was submitted by an account that is 33 days old and submits daily dot articles exclusively without ever commenting.<p>I pointed this out once before, the last time they wrote an article and submitted it, and that was about the same thing too.
Link aggregating sites and social media are rampant with abuse and shilling. It's the name of the game. From celebrities trying to pass off obviously paid tweets as legitimate to every traffic driven/ad driven site engaging in shilling and upvote scamming.<p>It's pretty obivous to spot if you're a normal user of these types of sites.<p>But administrators usually have no incentive whatsoever to stop it unless the users actually get out the torches and pitchforks, and the administrators themselves are in danger of being called out as supporting this behavior. But in reality it's trivially easy for them to watch for it and stop it if they're interested in it.<p>I was in charge of a small, niche hobby forum that garnered about 20k visitors per day. Peanuts compared to anything larger, but even we had shills. I would spot it and stop it because I cared about the quality of the discussion far more than the number of posts or visitors.<p>Digg lost the number one spot because in its revision previously rather than stomping out shilling and vote scamming, Digg attempted to legitimize it and mainstream the sites that previously had engaged in nefarious acts to try to garner traffic.<p>Users are not innocent in this whole situation either; if they paid attention and reacted appropriately to shills and obvious voting abuse, the administrators would be forced to act responsibly. But users are apathetic most of the time, and often complicit in it.
This post is full of teh drama, and pretty sophomoric, with the self-righteous conclusion...<p><i>The Miltz brothers learned the hard way that cheating Reddit doesn’t pay.</i><p>More like 'eventually stops paying.' If they were making $1.2m/month at the peak it seems reasonable to guess that they pulled in somewhere between $5 and $10 million over the two years of unhindered operation and resultant growth. Maybe more, but even if they only made $1 million that's a pretty nice payout for two people.<p>It's odd how the article totally ignores this in favor of the opportunity cost. To me it seems like gtwo8 and his brother made a small fortune without any incurring any legal problems, and learned enough to repeat the formula in some other context later.
I've had varied experiences with sites and banning. A couple of years ago, I made a funny picture site where I would collect some of these visual jokes. (plug: <a href="http://caption-of-the-day.com" rel="nofollow">http://caption-of-the-day.com</a>) I never submitted here, of course, but I also got zero traction on reddit. It always seemed weird to me that reddit was such a wasteland for that material, especially when there was so much of it on there.<p>Then this year, before the NSA story broke, I figured privacy and anonymity would be a big issue, one I was passionate about. So I created <a href="http://freedom-or-safety.com" rel="nofollow">http://freedom-or-safety.com</a> It's a mix of rewriting long stories into 3-5 paragraph summaries (with appropriate links back), and original commentary.<p>Since the majority of stuff on that site was technology/privacy related, and since many of my friends are here and like that kind of stuff, I submitted a lot of it on HN.<p>Then I got banned on HN. Beats me how. Still waiting to figure that one out. I asked to be reinstated and I was, but without knowing what I've done it makes it really difficult to avoid doing it again. I've stopped creating content over there while I figure out if it's worth getting another ban here because of who-knows-what. Sucks to have your work silenced due to forces outside your control and understanding. I really feel for all those other meme sites struggling away on reddit all that while. How many hundreds or thousands of hours of productivity were destroyed trying to honestly work with a system that was rigged all along?<p>We like to think of these aggregation sites as pristine, driven by the user voice, and automatically selecting and promoting good content. But after many years on several such sites, and after submitting my own stuff on several of them, I don't have such a charitable opinion. I like HN, and I really like the folks here, but in their effort to keep the site cleaned up, they've created an opaque and non-intuitive system. In many ways, this has the same effect on trust as having a crooked moderator. Things just don't make sense and don't feel right, but hell if you can put your finger on exactly what's going on.
I would be quite fascinated to learn if the AdviceAnimals moderator that quashed the first investigation into gtw08 was receiving kickbacks from Quickmeme. The article does not go into that at all and it seems like an obvious point to address.
<i>The point that I make to people of your generation is that you can't lie to reddit. It's remarkable how many people try, but they don't understand that reddit's ability to detect bullshit is insanely high.</i><p>Gabe Newell Reflections of a Video Game Maker [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU</a>
<i>Quickmeme was now netting the brothers around $1.6 million a month</i><p>So...say I have an idea which would allow me to drive a lot of traffic to my site from Reddit. How does one begin to monetize this traffic? Where do you start? Where do you go to find advertisers? I've always had a vague understanding how it worked, but if I really had an idea with lots of traffic generation today, I lack the real world understanding re: how to turn that traffic into dollars <i>now</i>.<p>Also, /r/AdviceAnimals all seem to link directly to images...so where would the page views for quickmeme come from? Were they generating $1.6M simply by showing ads to the meme creators?
No idea if anyone's interested, but I'm currently working on an open source Quickmeme alternative. I plan to deploy the MVP later this week. The Github repository is over at <a href="https://github.com/zachlatta/easymeme" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zachlatta/easymeme</a>
Ironically the submitter is a dailydot spammer, the second submission they've successfully spammed about this site spamming reddit.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904</a>
Between all the image macro sites, who holds copyright on the base images?<p>I imagine the owners of Grumpy Cat (the cat) are motivated to continue to allow photos of their pet to be used as Grumpy Cat (the meme), because they get exposure. But what about Overly Attached Girlfriend (apologies, don't remember her name IRL) -- the photos are of her, not a pet. I would think she has a stronger case in demanding ownership.
I would love to see livememe bring a lawsuit, not because I'm trigger happy but because it sounds like they lost a ton of money which only had one direct cause.