
The Reddit sleuths who brought down a meme empire - OTRAustin
http://www.dailydot.com/business/reddit-quickmeme-banned-miltz-brothers/
======
hayksaakian
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.

~~~
OTRAustin
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
OTRAustin
Adding it now. Good suggestion.

~~~
benologist
And what will you do for this blatant spam account?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=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.

~~~
hayksaakian
I thought for a second that they might be changing, but this basically proves
me wrong.

~~~
yuhong
Well, we will see if they add the disclosure in the about field.

------
ebbv
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.

~~~
thedaveoflife
In the same vein, aren't most newspaper articles simply PR in some form or
another? The key is to be a savvy enough user to spot it.

~~~
hobs
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.

A !ton! of "news" is just reposting reposts.

~~~
nwzpaperman
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.

------
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
vermontdevil
But I wonder what are the costs to host all these images and traffic.

~~~
umsm
Definitely no where near the reported millions of income. Data hosting is
probably the lowest expense a website has.

------
DanielBMarkham
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](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](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.

~~~
tzs
> 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.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=greenpizza13)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=luka1413)

~~~
tptacek
There might be a voting ring detector thing happening here, too.

------
Hovertruck
It really bothers me that the word "meme" has become a synonym for these
Advice Animal style images.

~~~
heartbreak
You mean "image macros"

~~~
kmfrk
You mean "demotivational posters".

Words change. "LOL" means something different than it used to. Such is the
fluidity of language and the web.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Image macros come from Japanese message boards; they are not really related to
the faux motivational posters that are commonly known as "demotivationals".

~~~
astrange
Image macros came from SomethingAwful, although even then it was only a brief
period where they were actual "macros".

Japanese sites don't even let you embed images. Everyone uses ASCII art
(actually SJIS of course).

------
SeanDav
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.

~~~
minimaxir
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.

------
acgourley
_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._

Gabe Newell Reflections of a Video Game Maker [1]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU)

------
fnordfnordfnord
_" The Miltz brothers learned the hard way that cheating Reddit doesn’t pay."_

Looks like it paid handsomely for a year or more.

~~~
redblacktree
Exactly my thought when I read that. I figured if I was them, I'd be saying,
"Well, at least I've already got the yachts and vacation homes."

------
zalew
> The Miltz brothers learned the hard way that cheating Reddit doesn’t pay.

1.6 million dollars per month doesn't pay?

~~~
xanderstrike
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.

~~~
baggachipz
Still ~$320,000 per month... nothing to sneeze at there either. I somehow
doubt their infrastructure costs anywhere near that.

------
rufugee
_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?

~~~
minimaxir
Quickmeme used the infamous transparent JPG trick to prevent direct linking of
images, forcing links on /r/AdviceAnimals to link to the page with ads.

~~~
rufugee
Can you explain how this works or provide a link to an explanation? Thanks.

~~~
minimaxir
A little discussion here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5928510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5928510)

~~~
jessaustin
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...

~~~
FireBeyond
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".

~~~
icebraining
Nope, just Select All → View Source, which shows the current DOM state, at
least on Firefox.

~~~
skeletonjelly
Used to weird me out that Chrome performs a new GET request for page source
but I guess I'm used to it now.

------
bostonpete
What happened to the higher ranking mod who tried to intimidate
ManWithoutModem to not look into the issue any further...?

~~~
makomk
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.

------
zachlatta
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](https://github.com/zachlatta/easymeme)

~~~
billybob255
It's a cool project, but HN doesn't seem like the sort of site that would be
interested. Not that I'm criticizing you or your post.

~~~
zachlatta
Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I'm not the biggest fan of memes myself. The
opportunity arose, so I asked myself why not.

------
benologist
Ironically the submitter is a dailydot spammer, the second submission they've
successfully spammed about this site spamming reddit.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5927904)

------
chiph
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.

~~~
icebraining
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.

------
thereallurch
estimated $1.6 mil a month for > 12 months? For a meme generator? I'd say they
had a good run.

~~~
Puer
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...

~~~
numbsafari
I guess Reddit could complain to the DA and press charges under CFAA, but the
irony would probably cause the internet to implode.

------
MWil
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.

~~~
danielweber
I don't think you have a right to not have your stuff downvoted on a website.

~~~
MWil
I think you do have a right not to have your competitors engage in
anticompetitive behavior

------
NanoWar
"The Miltz brothers learned the hard way that cheating Reddit doesn’t pay."

Well, actually...

------
_pmf_
> The Reddit sleuths who brought down a meme empire

... asylum ... inmates.

------
pawrvx
Reddit needs to get rid of all moderators from the default sub-reddits if it
want's to survive over the long term.

