Limits at Gawker? Rules at Reddit? Wild West Web Turns a Page

I'm perfectly fine with management at a media company deciding it wants the curate the content that is produced by employees or visitors.

If the best defense of some piece of writing that an author can muster is that the writing "isn't illegal," then what value have you added to the community of readers/consumers.

I'm tired of having to ignore racists, trolls, etc. Why should I have to constantly filter trash from my input. I'll be happy when spam filters are omnipresent and upgraded to "content quality" filters.

There will always be a frontier where there are few rules and even less oversight. But the frontier of today won't be the frontier of tomorrow, that's all we're seeing... a shift. If you want the stuff Reddit is purging, there are plenty of places to find it.

Attempt at Reddit summary: Doing "web 2.0" to outsource content creation to the public for free while collecting all the corporate ad revenue sounds pretty cool until inevitably the people you outsourced your culture, brand, and message to disagree with people on the payroll and the org chart or with your corporate advertisers, but you can't do the traditional neofeudalistic corporate top down enforcement via the payroll and org chart if your content generators are not on the payroll or org chart because you outsourced them to web 2.0 general public.

Reddit Lesson: Never outsource your core competency.

The gawker story appears to have nothing in common at all. Seems to summarize to being totally spineless about admitting they operate an online supermarket checkout lane tabloid, followed by drama over people who would like to pretend they are not (why? They can't be that dumb, ego they're being paid to generate heat and clicks with an artificial story), with a side dish of I'd rather debate the overall ethical issues of tabloids as an industry sector being good or bad.

Gawker lesson: Be honest. People might or might not like you, but they hate dishonesty more.

If there is an overall lesson from both, from a past article awhile ago, I suggested an indication of bubble top is we're seeing the results of amateur hour tryhard then crashing and burning. Basic management leadership skills would have avoided both problems; "real companies" do not suffer from basic mistakes like this. In zero sum bubble markets like real estate, commodities, and stocks there's a concept of bag holders, where around the top, you can tell who the incompetent traders are because they're the ones left holding the bag. With a side dish of if you can't tell who the bag holder is, you're probably the bag holder (there is a poker table analogy WRT suckers...) Everyone can see bagholders all across tech, therefore we're at or just past a bubble top in internet tech companies again. Its all downhill from April 2001 or spring of 2015 or whatever. Wheeee!