Quickmeme
About
Quickmeme is an image captioning website that hosts galleries of advice animals and other user-submitted image macros. In June of 2013, the site was banned from the social news community Reddit for alleged vote manipulation.
History
In 2007, the website company Miltz Media was founded by brothers Stephen and Wayne Miltz, with their first site NCGolfers[2] catered to golfing enthusiasts in North Carolina.Quickmeme was launched by Sprklab founder Shah Pavel Jamal in 2011 and later that same year, it was sold to Miltz Media[3], a website company founded by brothers Stephen and Wayne Miltz. On June 24th, 2011, a Facebook[4] page for the site was created, garnering more than 59,000 likes in the next two years. On April 25th, 2012, US News[5] published an article about the Ridiculous Photogenic Guy advice animal series, which included an interview with Wayne Miltz who revealed that the site received much of its traffic from Facebook, Reddit and Stumbleupon.
Features
The site allows users to upload template images that can be customized with superimposed captions in Impact font. Specific advice animals have their own gallery pages which can be sorted by creation date or popularity.
Controversies
Webtoid
In 2009, Miltz Media launched the social news site Webtoid, which functioned much like Reddit with a similar user interface (shown below). On February 12th, Redditor pizzatime submitted a post to the /r/WTF[15] subreddit, accusing Webtoid of copying Reddit. Prior to being archived, the post gained over 1,700 up votes and 670 comments. As of June 2013, the site is no longer running.
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Reddit Ban
On June 22nd, 2013, /r/AdviceAnimals subreddit moderator jokes_on_you announced[7] that Quickmeme had been banned from Reddit with a Scumbag Steve image macro (shown below). In the comments section, jokes_on_you revealed that the owner of Quickmeme had become an /r/AdviceAnimals mod with the handle gtw08[8] in June of 2011[14] and had since begun using bots to down vote submissions from other websites. Additional evidence was provided in the comment section by former moderator ManWithoutModem, who shared screenshots arguing that someone had been using a vote bot to downvote any submissions that did not come from Quickmeme.
In his comment, ManWithoutModem noted that he had removed gtw08's mod powers in March[9] after suspecting that he had a connection to Quickmeme. When other moderators learned ManWithoutModem had continued to investigate the situation in the days leading up to the ban, they removed his moderator powers as well.[10] As of June 24th, 2013, his powers have not been restored. The following day, Reddit bot qkme_transcriber issued a statement[11] via its personal subreddit making it clear that the creator of the bot had no affiliation with Quickmeme and does not condone gaming Reddit. The same day, the Daily Dot[12] reported on the story, noting that Quickmeme had removed all links to Reddit across their site. Quickmeme briefly addressed the situation on their Tumblr blog[13], but the post has since been taken down. Though many fans have been commenting on the ban on Quickmeme's Facebook fan page[4], the site has not responded or posted since June 21st.
Traffic
According to Sprklab founder Shah Pavel Jamal, Quickmeme was receiving five million visits per month within three months of launch. In April of 2012, Wayne Miltz revealed that the site was bringing in almost 70 million unique visitors per month.[5] As of June 2013, Quickmeme has an Alexa[6] global rank of 836 and a rank of 270 in the United States.
Search Interest
External References
[1] The Daily Tarheel – New website pokes fun at parents texts
[2] NC Golfers – North Carolina Golfers
[5] US News – How Internet Memes Went Corporate
[7] Reddit – /r/AdviceAnimals: Quickmeme is banned reddit-wide. More inside.
[8] Reddit – /u/gtw08 (Archive from March 19th, 2013)
[9] Stattit – /r/AdviceAnimals Statistics
[10] Reddit – /r/AdviceAnimals: ManWithoutModem's comment
[11] Reddit – /r/qkme_transcriber: About the banning of Quickmeme links.
[12] The Daily Dot – Quickmeme banned from Reddit for alleged vote manipulation
[13] Tumblr – quickmeme: Quickmeme and Reddit Ban (404's)
[14] Reddit – /r/AdviceAnimals: /r/AdviceAnimals is looking for a new mod: gtw08's application
[15] Reddit – What is Webtoid And Why Does it Look Just Like Reddit
Recent Videos
There are no videos currently available.
![uickmeme BLOGROLL] TOP QUICK MEMES TODAY Quickmeme and reddit-ban The feed providing these headlines is not available the frst of your friends to like this. Crazy Things Parents There are two sides to every story and we would like to have a better voice in sharing ours and our loyalty towards reddit, it's users and our own fans Quickmeme has over half a million registered users in conjunction with reddit's AdviceAnimals and has always been a favorite site of redditors (at least the ones that love memes). There have been malicious attacks and voting done over the past few months between Reddit Enhancement Suite com. Along with actual malicious attacks from me Reddit Enhancement Suites browser extension on quickmeme's site, two in ular The first was changing the submit to reddit links from quickmeme to resme me and our users were then submitting those links instead. Of which a percentage of the traffic would then be skimmed to livememe. (you can see that resme me and livememe reside on the same server and subnet. And you'll also see resme me buit into the javascript of livememe's captioner) The second attack to quickmeme's actual site was recently ac button is to point at our own r for users of RES. With our captioner being broken, less posts from quickmeme would happen and more post to their owned site livememe would occur to Lastly they also change all the quickmeme links on reddit to resme me via Reddit Enhancement Suite. Before we stopped them from hot linking, they had a "make your own caption button under the images that they were hot linking from quickmeme, that would then post to livememe even when the link was from quickmeme. You can also see that Reddit Enhancement Suite links directly to all competing meme-generators images directly, except for livememe.com, which links to an ad paying page on livememe Before we dive more into things, let's take note that Reddit Enhancement Suite has millions of users of it's browser extension. And thus control of the users browser and actions of those that use this extension That said, we'd like to point out all the voting that was happening to livememe posts a few months back. t actually happened the day a smear campaign came out against quickmeme from the reddit user yourfriendshateyou whom has also been in close contact with the mod ManWithoutModem. What we saw was that all of the sudden livememe posts where everywhere all at the top of reddit, it just seemed suspicious as it was out of the norm in combination with a smear campaign from the user yourfriendshateyou. Livememe stayed like that for a few days, so lt needed to be poked more into it, to see if livememe were voting up their own post or Well, it turn out they were, BIG time. We were confused at the time, of how that was even possible with reddit. We always thought that reddit would have good vote bot detection in place and would stop it So how was it possible that livememe post where going from 10 upvotes on posts that were 30-40 mins old and then suddenly to 150 upvotes in a few minutes time. WOwW We pointed this out to other mods of AA, specifically noonches. A few more posts of livememe did this right after. Two posts from livememe were suspiciously removed to see what was going on with them. All of the 150-200 upvotes occurred while the post were removed for a few mins and then soon reapproved. It was successful because unless there is bad voting activity happening on reddit. It shouldn't be slammed with upvotes, especially that many from that old of a post. So, in conjunction with the mod noonches, he made this graph from his site http:/71up.com/redditigraph.php, it tracked all of livememe's post for a while. Over time we were able to see what we would call "bump ups" in posts were time no idea on how it would even be possible As the story unfolds, resme.me is created after these events. resme me from Reddit Enhancement Suite first started out simply link jacking all of quickmeme post and then hot linked all of quickmeme's images to resme me(whatever meme) jpg from reddit.com. This happened for a month but wasn't being what we would call malicious Then, resme me added an "add caption" button underneath the hot linked images from quickmeme, this button used quickmeme's captioner to create memes directly from resme.me(quickmeme's hot linked image) jpg Borderline abuse, but still not what we would call malicious. Now here's where it gets good, a week or two later when a user would hit the Take caption" button underneath the linked jackedhot linked quickmeme images coming from reddit and what happened? It created the image but was posted to livememe.com, thus having the user submit back to reddit the created livememe image Now why would they do that?! It was a link from quickmeme, that was then linked jack and directed to resme.mel(hot linked quickmeme image). but when a user made this is was created to livememe That's when the correlation between resme me which is owned by Reddit Enhancement Suite, as it was Reddit Enhancement Suite that implemented this (at the time resme.me would reside to redditenhancementsuite.com) and This is where things went from friendly to malicious. Just a few days later and what happened next was even more unreal. Reddit Enhancement Suite changed all the "Click here to submit to reddit" buttons on quickmeme.com's site, (which would normally then bring up the submit page to AdviceAnimals and have qkme me (memelink) as the link url) and changed quickmeme's uris to resme me (memelink) urls. So now they were forcing redditors to submit from quickmeme on behave of resme.me and resme me was the What made matters even worse was that a percentage of the time the resme me links that had been submitted to reddit, would redirect to livememe.com's site with the same created meme image surrounded by ads Even though the original meme created came from quickmeme.com use quickmeme and it's users to promote their own site livememe.com. livememe also changed it's captioner during this time and started using the captioner that resme me was using and you could also see resme me written into a lot of the code of livememe's javascript and captioning process. The big kicker is resme me resides on the same subnet of servers that livememe.com does. It doesn't take a smart person to figure out that Reddit Enchantment Suite (resme me) owns livememe.com, though not publicly on com posts and smear campaigns against quickmeme.com, has been used to malicious damage quickmeme's brand When you correlate Reddit Enhancement Suite and livememe together, you can see how Reddit Enhancement Suite could use it's browser extension in a way of self promotion, control of users browser interactions with quickmeme and reddit, and the control of users actions (votes, etc...) Lastly, quickmeme would have no reason for vote bots". We wouldn't benefit since our fans are so loyal, we'd have nothing to gain. Also there hasn't been any self promotion on AdviceAnimals, quickmeme hasn't been listed on the sidebar for a long time. And before that, other mods of AA controlled the We really value all of you and hope for your continued support. Sinc , Wayne and the team behind quickmeme Four daily source for the funniest memes, videos and pics](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/list/000/566/011/efb.png "efb.png")
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Top Comments
GHETT0SAUCE
Jun 24, 2013 at 02:55PM EDT
Myconix
Jun 24, 2013 at 07:34PM EDT