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 https://github.com/zachlatta/easymeme
Are there any possible legal repercussions? I mean, yeah, if they made upwards of 12 million dollars from their site then banning it from reddit isn't exactly going to hurt them...
Those numbers are from Worth of Web which is not reliable source. Were they making bank? Sure, but nowhere near $1m per month. CPM on websites like these is low.
He's still a moderator there and still hasn't reinstated ManWithoutModem as one. Apparently a large chunk of the Advice Animals moderation team also quit over it.
Image macros come from Japanese message boards; they are not really related to the faux motivational posters that are commonly known as "demotivationals".
They were originally "image macros," but some image macros became memes unto themselves. Eventually people started referring to image macros as memes. Advice Animals started somewhere in the middle of all of this. Originally image macros didn't share a common picture, but a common phrase with a funny picture that was related or a specific image/phrase combination (e.g. "do not want", "no u", "get in the soup"[1]).
Interestingly, this is one of the few news outlets that correctly identified them as "image macros". Pull quote:
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.
Dawkins's concept of memes provides an interesting way to look at the nature of humanity, society, and civilizations. It's a simple concept, too: something graspable by any reasonably observant person. It's perhaps a little sad that something which represents naught but a shadow of the original idea has overtaken it in such a popular forum.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, there's no evidence. (most of the article's information were from MwM and jokes_on_you themselves)
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.
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 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.
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.
I pointed this out once before, the last time they wrote an article and submitted it, and that was about the same thing too.
The submitter is the Asst. Managing Editor of the Daily Dot.
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.
Agreed, it sounded like the Atlantic guy banned eons ago was actually a good community member. At some point the Reddit restriction of "submit any content but your own" feels very artificial.
"Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, and it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content."
It's definitely not encouraged on Reddit, one of the old notes of Redditquite is "if more than 10% of what you submit is your personal content, then you're probably a spammer."
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.
I've always found that attitude of not promoting your own stuff annoying. If you took the time to write it and think about it, you should be proud of it! If you're just spamming, people will see it and vote accordingly.
I'm curious about the submission throttling that you have experienced. You have 4 submissions from the last month (last 30 days) and 9 submissions for the two previous months. What is being throttled?
I don't know, but I rarely can submit new stuff...
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...
It matters heaps - links submitted by community members with no affiliation to the source have been judged worthy for submission based purely on the content's merit.
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.
Exactly. A part of me was kind of sad that Digg's final phase of being a direct aggregator of news without "submission" but instead sucking the news straight from RSS feeds and pumping it into the hivemind upvote/downvote system... that this system tanked so badly and was so poorly done. Requiring that the "submitter" be some legitimate member of the community seems forced, as long as it's not high-frequency spam.
I don't mind that, but it should be posted transparently in the 'about' field of his HN profile, along with a link and contact. If you're on HN to promote your brand then journalistic ethics, as well as basic respect for other community members, suggests that disclosure of interest is appropriate.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve had extensive dialogue with Hacker News moderators about submitting Daily Dot stories. It’s something we do sparingly, with great caution, thought, and discussion. We take HN very seriously and want to ensure that we only contribute quality content that’s in line with the rules and standards. We value the community here, and we’ll make more of an effort moving forward to submit links from other parts of the Web.
I'm fine with it, but you should put your affiliation in your profile for everyone else to see. Mods - this ought to be a requirement of using HN as a promotional outlet.
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.
To be honest, a reminder is definitely good. I was just worried about making definite claims without evidence. And just because one spam account can be explained like this don't mean it can be applied to all of them.
Point taken. I've updated my profile to reflect my affiliation. As Austin pointed out, it's not our intention to spam—we only submit stories that could actually be of interest to the community. We'll make sure those stories are coming from a variety of sources in the future, and also contribute to discussions.
Well that 80% drop in traffic is going to ensure that it doesn't pay any more. They've probably spent millions on infrastructure that will no longer be generating revenue, I imagine they'll see losses while they adjust.
This kinda thing seems perfect for elastic computing. They could scaleup the front-end on demand, and use S3 or whatever for actual storage, then aggressively delete older or less popular content. If their traffic drops, just scale down.
"Cloud" in this manner seems like a great hedge for sites that rely on somewhat fickle popularity.
Did they grow on the back of cheating Reddit, however? If this was a more recent desperation tactic, then it did explode in their face rather spectacularly, seeing a much more dramatic decline than they would have likely seen with simple competition.
Between all the image macro sites, who holds copyright on the base images?
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.
Copyright is hold by the person who took the photo, so they both have a case. That said, what can she do? As long as Reddit responds to DMCA takedown requests, they should be under safe harbor, so unless she planned on suing each submitter - and for nothing, since damages would be very hard to show -, there's really not much she can do.
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: http://caption-of-the-day.com) 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.
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.
> It's a mix of rewriting long stories into 3-5 paragraph summaries (with appropriate links back), and original commentary.
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.
> 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.
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.
Quickmeme was now netting the brothers around $1.6 million a month
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?
So this means that there are a significant number of people "skilled" enough to right-click, but not skilled enough to view source. The mind boggles...
The latest variations of this put the transparent JPG in the source code, then load in the image via JS with a lower Z layer. Now you move from "View Source", to "Developer Extension, watch assets, copy initial URL, paste, save".
How is that at all surprising? Right click is a really common thing for most non-Mac users. View source is something most people have only used by accident.
I use a Mac every day. I also watch other people use Macs and not only do they not use a contextual menu, but they by and large don't use keyboard shortcuts either. HN users are a pretty small subset of computer users.
Yeah, that was annoying to deal with when I posted because I would have to use Chrome's Dev tools to extract the image Url. For the average user, this wasn't so helpful if they didn't want ads.
The $1.6 million a month estimate is completely made up. They just used some web service that tries to estimate, based on pageviews. Not based on any actual knowledge. (That said, they probably did well - but not that well.)
According to the same site, HN makes $1.4 million a year.
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.
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.
Yep.
Al Franken had a great piece he wrote about this when he was defending the claims of the liberal media and the like being biased against Bush. He went on to explain that most of the media is just an echo chamber, and repackaging a press release is much easier than actually doing work.
People have the opportunity to write news, but the will to write news isn't there, yet. With ~9 months of open-beta under our belts and no interference or incentivizing content of any stripe, people just don't cover what's in front of them. Fundamentally, I believe this is because people have a herding instinct and seek to be a member of a larger group. It's also possible that community-level(local) issues are "too close to home" for non-professionals to risk community reputation on.
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.
This post is full of teh drama, and pretty sophomoric, with the self-righteous conclusion...
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.
121 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadWords 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]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU
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'.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904
Looks like it paid handsomely for a year or more.
Well, actually...
... asylum ... inmates.