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Chris Menning tells us how it is.

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I have to agree with Chrismen on this. Reddit is doing a shit job at this. They want their posters to steal content if they don't want to risk bans and with that support plagiarism. Irony as well for the userbase, blaming 9gag for stealing content while they're a lot worse themselves. 9gag allows sources to be added with images, Reddit bans you for that. I can go deeper into this, but Chrismen explained most stuff already.

But I also have to slightly defend Reddit a bit on this. When seeing an article linked from a site different than imgur, they risk that it's spam or advertising (Imgur is the only source they can fully trust so to say). If we get a thread for a penis enlarger or just a vid someone made and wants to promote here, we want people to ignore it until mods take care of it. When we see a BNM post a link, there is always the risk involved that it's spam, so we are on the look-out. Of course the moderators at Reddit can't check every link posted, with their traffic that would be way too much work. As Chrismen said in his article, he wanted the traffic on his site to increase, thus he is advertising his blog if he makes that the source. But that doesn't take away that it's a shitty reason for banning, the content is still his.

But in Chrismen's defense on this, his account was already several years old, so the mods over there should've known he could be trusted. If we see a well known forum member post a link, we know it can be trusted. They should've checked his history first before jumping to a conclusion like that.

I'm also going to call an Inb4 "Reddit sux lel gimme karma" circlejerk. This userbase doesn't differ so much from theirs at times.

That's a very good point about the whole circulation of content online, especially on sites like reddit. Imgur makes it especially easy to repost images without any sort of credit. YouTube embedding is far easier as it's convenient and as stated, links directly back to the video.

Unless you're a site who embeds your site's details on the comic directly (like a webcomic), there's really no way to combat this. It really should be up to Imgur to provide a link back to where it was uploaded from. Although not optimal, it's better than nothing.

A reddit thread brought up two good points about directly linking from the original site.

• The site won't be able to handle the traffic from hundreds of thousands new vistors.


• Posting from an unknown site (which a lot of original content does) tends to deter readers.

Another I thought of was the use of the image link magnifier add-on for Chrome and Firefox which many use to view an image without leaving the page. In many cases, the original webpages won't support this.

So yeah, there's a lot to consider. reddit handles linking articles well but not at all with images. Same goes for sites like Memebase, FunnyJunk and 9gag who repost from others with credit hardly ever given (though to be fair, when the content already has a URL or title on it, they do link to the website, they also support users sending in sources). Something needs to change.

Edit: Actually, I've just noticed that imgur does do sourcing to some degree. However the image I found just linked to the reddit page on the image rather than where it came from (walkingfromwork.com).

Just an idea: here's some mockups I made for what sourcing should look like (uploaded to imgur for extra irony) -

A form to credit the author if wasn't credited or done incorrectly. Not sure how much effort this would require from their mods but I'm sure for the front-page reddit links they could spare the time. Or else just determine the source if it was directly uploaded via the site. I'm sure any uploader with morals would be fine with sourcing.

and a more prominent source link to the original site it was made for (underline will indicate it's a direct link either to the comic hosted on the page itself or just the site).

whispers Cyber, be careful, we are Cheezburger! They're going to get you

But yeah, there really should be more credit given to original artists. It would be extremely difficult on a site like Imgur, but I feel that certain sites that don't cough 9gag cough could do a much better job with it.

I don't think you've read my previous post.

So to proof it, I made a quick account on 9gag and clicked upload:

As you can see, 9gag supports giving credit where it belongs. If the users don't add sources when they upload an image, then the problem is 9gag's userbase, not the site itself. Not to forget that, although it's rare outside of rage comics, several images uploaded to 9gag are still original.

@Random:

Yup. On the internet, I'm a scanner. If it was in a textbook, I probably would have read the whole thing, but here, I usually read the first couple of lines to judge whether or not to read it. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of skipping most of your post (no offense)

But I still feel that 9gag could do a better job (I don't want to single them out, but they are a prime, as well as one of the most common, example of the problem). In a world with TinEye (yes, I know, it won't find the original source, but a search based off of it can lead to it), is it impossible to verify something like an image source better?

^ It's true, the only reason 9gag is bad is because of its users. Actually, I used to browse the site fairly often and the oldfags used to always complain about people reposting shit all the time. The site is shit, but it doesn't deserve as much hate as it gets.

I don't use Reddit, however I have gone there a few times and I must say I don't like how possible it is for another advice animal to pop up in our database here…

But hey, what do I know?

Reddit doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

And this pic explains why it doesn't to me.

Reddit copies from other websites and claims it as their own creation as much as 9gag does. I go onto my Rage Comics app everyday, and can't go by one comic that is complaining about 9gag.

Seriously. Plagiarism is plagiarism, but don't be hypocritical about it.

Original Content?
No, the word of the day is now "website traffic".

I agree with everything Menning said in the article, but some would say we're really no different.

Let me make a quote:

The Imgur-Reddit combo is sucking bloggers like The Frogman dry as users combine his photosets into one Imgur pic, slap it up on Reddit, and reap karma while utterly failing to even acknowledge the artist’s existence.

That wasn't from Chris Menning's article, but from one of the ones he linked to. Our image galleries essentially work the same way. We find an image we like, copy its URL, find the appropriate gallery, paste it into a box, then hit submit. It is then put up on display for everyone to upvote or downvote. However, the original source isn't mentioned anywhere on the page. Some would argue that most uploaders don't take credit for the creation of the image, but they do get recognition for it. Though upvotes on an image don't count towards a person's karma score, there are users who only upload tons of images onto the site and get followers and appreciation for it (usually in the form of "Thanks for uploading good images").

The article Menning linked to made the point that Reddit makes money off this. So do we. We have adverts running on each image and image gallery, and we're always displaying popular images onto the "Trending Images" section and onto the front page so people can easily access them and net the site a few extra cents. Though we might not take the credit of making the image, we make revenue from it.

We did add a claim authorship function a few months back, but it's highly inefficient and hardly used. For example, I got a notification a few months back about an image in one of the entries I have editor-ship for. The sender was the author of said image, and asked for proper attribution. I spent about maybe ten minutes filling out the form like Brad's thread described. Three months later, there is still no difference.

My point is that we really can't hate on Reddit or on 9gag's userbase while we ourselves fail to acknowledge original sources and make revenue from others' creations.

Let's take a look at the videos made by KawaiiPiranha:

That sub-reddits are a really… Awfull sometimes.
I really really really REALLY disagree with their "Hivemind"… I saw that some people were raging at a guy because his wife played CoD: Not worth it ಠ_ಠ

For example, if you take r/gaming , you can see that the posts in the front page are related to:
-How Valve is a god-like company ( Valve is good but they take that too seriously)
-How ALL THE OTHER game companys are THE worst thing.
_-Freaking old game _(Too much nostalgia…)
-How PC gamers are waaaaay better
Steam offers (Really, they Print Screen games on Steam)
-The Legend of Zelda
-How Gabe Newell is god
-Why CoD and ANYONE who likes it si horrible (CoD nowadays isn't that great, but I they took that way serious)
The minority is good.

Now r/atheism, they are THE ARROGANT sub-reddit. They are all like hurr, God is not real, derr, we are smarter because we have no religion herrr Really?

Also, when I posted something saying that I don't like Half-Life or that I like EA games, I was Downvoted to oblivion…
Reddit is nice sometimes, but somethings in there suck!

The above is a copy-paste, seriously I SWEAR I've seen that post before…

Nope. I made all that.

Copypasta or not, it's true what you said.

No, no. I wasn't saying it was copy-pasta, I just got an odd case of déjà vu.

I guess the claim authorship function should be posted in bold and the tallest font size ever on the frontpage, because it's a very useful item.

Also they had a war with team AVO. Now for all those who don't know who they are team Avolition are a griefing team who grief servers on minecraft and other games then once the owner says team AVO deserves ice cream they become friends but at reddit everyone was so butthurt to threaten them and generally trying to ruin there success.

If you want to see trolled redditers.

@HellSpawn
That's like a 10 year old trolling attempt. I was hoping for something really epic…

I think that most hates for things are just people jumping on the hate bandwagon. Sure some people can give good explanations as to why they hate things, like here on KYM among other places. A lot of this probably stems from the popularity and influence of 4chan. 4chan will pretty much declare war on anything for any reason, and most of the internet will agree with them because of their influence on internet culture. As for my opinion on Reddit, I refer to my opinion of 9gag: "I don't hate them, I just dislike a few things they have done. They haven't done anything for me to hate them, because they haven't exactly done anything bad, just stupid"