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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I'm hoping he regretted funding 9GAG. It's one of the most unethical companies I've ever come across. This post on /r/4chan details some of their misdeeds:

http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/9gag_repost_mac...

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This may seem obvious, but don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

The post I linked to is just a fairly comprehensive example of a widely-known phenomenon. While some details in that post may be erroneous, the overall picture is not and has been independently arrived at by many different people. 9GAG reposts content from other sites. Fine. I'm not concerned about that. I'm concerned about the dishonesty with which they do it, and the claiming of others' content as their own. I don't even care that they use dummy accounts to make the community appear more involved than it is, after all that's how reddit started out, as well. I care that it's those dummy repost accounts that are responsible for some of the more egregious acts of plagiarism.

Lots of redditors will repost a picture and claim it as their own, but this is both frowned upon and the doing of users, not admins. 9GAG admins themselves are the ones guilty of plagiarism, and that's where they cross the line.

I didn't know about 9GAG, but unethical behavior is exactly the kind of reason for regretting funding that I had in mind with my question.

Barely anything on reddit is original content, I don't think the users should complain about reposts on other sites. If it keeps certain demographics away, it might even be a good thing for reddit's content/comment quality.

There's a difference between posting something from another site, even if it's a screenshot, and scrubbing the watermark then adding your own in an attempt to claim authorship. Reddit does the former, 9GAG the latter.

> Barely anything on reddit is original content

On the contrary, Reddit (and particularly smaller subreddits) contain some of the most active and intelligent conversation available to vast general audiences on the web. AMAs alone spark a lot of interesting dialogue. Nick Eftiamiades' yesterday was really enlightening (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/zchnb/ive_appeared_on_...). The hivemind can be embarrassing, but there's still a lot to glean from such a userbase.

Never mind 9GAG, what about Zynga?

Outside of Zynga's acquisition of OMGPOP, I don't believe YC has any ties to them. I could be wrong.

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