The Reddit sleuths who brought down a meme empire
dailydot.com
dailydot.com
I pointed this out once before, the last time they wrote an article and submitted it, and that was about the same thing too.
That being said, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with accounts that exist specifically to submit a given site's content (even programmatically), since that content must be still democratically approved by the user base. I think vote-brigading is a much more serious issue, and one that HN seems to deal with well.
Plenty of people submit their own content. In fact, it's encouraged. You have reddit confused with digg, somehow.
From reddiquette.
Once, someone submitted one of my blog posts about a rather interesting bug in a AAA game to /r/programming. Over 1,000 net score. Out of curiosity, I submitted the same post myself to /r/games. -7 score.
> If over 10% of your submissions are your own site/content, you're almost certainly a spammer.
[1] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_what_constitutes_spam.3F
At least I try to always make good submissions, and usually HN only let me submit twice every month...
When I joined HN I submitted a lot, but suddenly I could not submit for two weeks, then sometimes I can submit twice or three times in a week, and then have to wait two weeks again...
Why does it matter who does the submitting?
Dailydot, extremetech, pcmag, geek, macobserver, betabeat, itworld, bostinno etc have collectively operated dozens of acounts to spam their own stuff, none of which met an actual community member's standards for submitting a story.
Individuals submitting their own blog posts and especially with success are usually so low volume they're not even noticeable unless they overdo it and inevitably get called out for it.
I prefer to say "could" instead of "have" unless you have definite evidence.
Plus dailydot are just getting started with the OP + 'sexyalterego'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=sexyalterego
It's a shame the mods didn't shitlist your domain entirely, you're obviously here just to exploit HN.
But I will concede it could be some random, unaffiliated person who just really, really, really, really wishes we would get our news from dailydot!
That definitely sounds more likely than spam on the internet.
He's most definitely not Jay Hathaway, AKA sexyalterego on reddit, currently "assigning editor at the Daily Dot".
https://www.google.com/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=You+...
I for one am shocked it wasn't some random unaffiliated person who just really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really wanted us to get our news from dailydot.
You could add a lot of value to the discussions and to the DailyDot if you were to participate to some extent in the discussions.
It's pretty obivous to spot if you're a normal user of these types of sites.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A !ton! of "news" is just reposting reposts.
Many people validate their positions--and themselves--by the quantity of people that agree with them which leads to holding popular positions.
At certain points in time altruism and necessity meet to overcome these social forces, but it's usually only when crisis forces everyone to the table.
www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Of course not. They're often the ones running the gig in the first place.
The Miltz brothers learned the hard way that cheating Reddit doesn’t pay.
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.
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.
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 http://freedom-or-safety.com It's a mix of rewriting long stories into 3-5 paragraph summaries (with appropriate links back), and original commentary.
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.
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?
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 never read your site so please take this with a grain of salt. But I assume the long stories were not your writing, right? You were taking other people's writing and condensing it down. That's not really that valuable or useful, and might have violated this part of the HN guidelines:
> Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
HN bans often seem completely arbitrary. I recently turned on "showdead" to see what gets banned, and have come across some quite puzzling ones.
For instance, there is greenpizza13 [1]. His offense appears to have been posting a comment that called that "wat" video "hilarious".
Even more puzzling is luka1413 [2]. Just two comments. Neither particularly useful, but not offensive and certainly no more useless than many of the comments of regulars here.
Words change. "LOL" means something different than it used to. Such is the fluidity of language and the web.
Japanese sites don't even let you embed images. Everyone uses ASCII art (actually SJIS of course).
[1] http://endlesspicdump.com/original/shut%20the%20hell%20up%20...
His history on Reddit amounted to little more than link submissions to a relatively new site called Quickmeme, where users type bold-faced captions on popular memes like Scumbag Steve and Success Kid.
These are known as image macros.
Is it possible that the meme of Dawkins's "meme" could itself die out, killed off by a parasitic invasive species that claimed its very name? Without that name, how do we talk about them?
Or, is the spread of the name 'meme' to mean 'image macros' instead indicative of the power of Dawkins's original idea? Here we are, looking at a community of a million teenagers, most of them utterly uninterested in thinking about the spread of ideas, taking a name from science and applying it to their own culture. The kids aren't even using the word incorrectly: image macros are a meme; individual examples are memes themselves, competing, reproducing, thriving, dying.
Fun to think about.
Warning: Weirdness
Anyway, I'd say many people still understand the original meaning and distinguish between the two given enough context.
As mentioned with the article, Redditors shy away from conspiracy theories, because most of them sound too stupid to be true. Which, of course, makes actual conspiracies very effective.
Gabe Newell Reflections of a Video Game Maker [1]
Looks like it paid handsomely for a year or more.
1.6 million dollars per month doesn't pay?
"Cloud" in this manner seems like a great hedge for sites that rely on somewhat fickle popularity.
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 now.
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?
click somewhere else ctrl-v
and yes, view-source is beyond most people
According to the same site, HN makes $1.4 million a year.
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.
Well, actually...
... asylum ... inmates.