
What Happens When You Piss Off the Internet - buf
http://bufr.tumblr.com/post/19112788402/dont-piss-off-the-internet?1
======
mquander
_"The point that I’m trying to make is if you’re going to spent months of your
time and thousands of your dollars drafting a concept, hiring a team, and
building a free and completely open source video game as a hobby, you better
use zombies as your theme."_

That is not the right thing to have learned from this. I suggest this one:

If you're going to take a bunch of ideas and content wholesale from a
community for your new thing, it might be good if you engage with that
community and make something that respects the context of the stuff you're
taking, instead of making something they'll perceive as cheap and foreign.

~~~
Confusion
Which community would that be? 4chan? Reddit? The rest of the internet that
also regurgitates memes?

You cannot 'engage with' the internet as a whole. No community owns a meme:
it's the fact that so many people reproduce them that makes it a meme. The
problem here is that some folks do feel they, or their community, own a meme.
These people are the problem, not this guy with a place for a game. Or at
least, he's another kind of problem.

~~~
mquander
The engaging with the community isn't so that you can make a petition that
says, "Are you cool with my game [Y/N]" and have everyone on the Internet sign
it. It's so that you can create something which demonstrates an awareness of
the culture and doesn't come off as derivative and shallow to the people who
deal in it daily and care to defend it.

If he had made a post on Reddit or talked to anyone on 4chan and said "I want
to make a meme-themed iOS game, help me make it not suck" and listened, he
probably would have wound up making something that did not entice people to
mock him and insult him. That's what I mean about engaging.

------
rickmb
You want to exploit something you consider "garbage" but which has a certain
value to the people that create and/or perpetuate it, and you find it odd that
it would piss those people off?

This has nothing to do with "the internet" or Reddit, or 4chan or whatever.
You try to do this with some local group of people that's involved in whatever
kind of hobby or activity you consider weird, or "garbage", and you'll get
more or less the same response.

~~~
stfu
Plus the other aspect is that he is taking stuff that other people built for
their own enjoyment and trying to exploit it in a commercial context.

If he had tried pulling together an open source development team nobody would
have been seriously offended.

But what this guy is doing is the same as taking art done by anonymous street
artists and selling merchandise based on it. If people pay before or after the
production doesn't matter in that case. Acting totally surprised when "the
street" is fighting back seems slightly naive.

~~~
Domenic_S
FTA:

> When I sought out on the endeavor to create a mobile tower defense game, I
> announced that the game would be open source, and it would be free.

What are you talking about?

~~~
lwat
He means the money raising on Kickstarter

~~~
andolanra
No, but that's an understandable cultural misconception. The money is
relevant, but not the main issue at hand.

In these communities, nobody cares about money, because your standing in the
community isn't determined by how much money you have, but by _how much you
have contributed_. This is kind of implicit in 4chan users, where it's
considered tacky to even claim explicit ownership, because memes are
understood to be products of an amorphous community. It's explicit on places
like Reddit, where cultural standing is measured as a number.

Yes, the author would not be receiving money for this product, but having
created the game _as himself_ (as opposed to as, say, a semi-anonymous
Newgrounds member) he draws more ire. Contrast the relevant videos: the
original Kickstarter video features a single strong personality, a person
mediating the experience of the memes in the game, while the response video is
relatively anonymous, attempting to minimize the mediation between the viewer
and his point. The fact that the response video also calls out other YouTube
celebrities who do the same thing—i.e. offer mediation and commentary of other
content through an explicit personality—should be incredibly telling.

Other comments that say things like, "I'd be honored to have my content
featured in someone's game," are missing the point. It's a basic culture
clash: the article's author expresses distinct authorship which can be traced
to a concrete person (or persona), even if he gets no profit and open-sources
the result, while the people who make up the response understand that
authorship as contrary to the whole point of communal humor, i.e. memes. The
other meme aggregation sites are also 'mediators' of a sort, preventing people
from experiencing the direct product of the community.

------
IsaacL
I feel your pain. I had something similar happen to me -- though not to the
same degree. Recently I was selling posters based on a meme unique to my
campus -- the designs were our own (so we had the copyright), but the original
concept the memes were based on was not. (Imagine you sold a photo of your own
cat with the text "I can haz cheezburger" -- it's still your copyright,
right?)

Anyway, some guy started posting that we were fraudsters, were raping culture,
etc. It's funny, our troll sounded just like yours -- obviously intelligent
and articulate, but took something trivial (internet memes) way too seriously.
I really can't understand the mindset of these people -- when I noticed that
reddit was becoming a waste of time, I didn't post a long rant about it -- I
just stopped going to reddit.

If it's any comfort, know that such people likely have little else going on in
their life, and trolling in defence of their online "tribe" is all they have.
If you're actually creating stuff, being entrepreneurial, putting yourself out
there, you're already beating them.

------
thebigredjay
You have two problems:

1\. On the internet large amounts of traffic means that you will have trolls
galore. In my eyes some of those comments are normal internet fodder and just
need to be moderated out.

2\. You are using IP that you do not own. Memes are not public domain. Of
course that is going to get people angry, particularly when there is money
involved.

~~~
buf
1\. Point taken.

2\. Even under fair use? How do sites like memegenerator, knowyourmeme, and
others get away with it? They make money. My project was free.

~~~
smashing
My advice is to contact "memegenerator, knowyourmeme, and others" and ask them
what licensing agreements they have with the copyright holders that allow them
publish the content. You may be surprised to learn how much or how little
money changes hand.

~~~
buf
I spoke with the founder/owner of campusmemes.com asking the same questions.
He basically said, "We operate business as usual until we get a C&D. Remove
the image. Life goes on."

~~~
smashing
Hmm, The Monetization of Copyrighted Content without any Licenses sounds more
like a service than a software product. Maybe try to obtain license agreements
from the copyright holders and put the funding for agree'ed to licenses in the
Kickstarter campaign.

------
naner
This guy asked for money for a project using 4chan memes and got abused for
it. Not very surprising, they are a vindictive bunch and hate the
popularization of their culture. Their wrath is even greater if it even
appears that money is somehow involved.

A couple of years ago Hot Topic made a shirt using the "Rage Guy" face from
4chan. They responded by rebranding the "Rage Guy" as "Race Guy" making tons
of racist comics featuring the image and then complaining to Hot Topic for
supporting racism.[1]

1: <http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/race-guy>

Unrelated Question:

What happens on kickstarter when you pledge a project, they get tons of money,
and then they don't deliver? For example, what if this guy gets enough to
begin but he sucks at coding and isn't able to deliver anything like what he
promised? Or what if someone were to just pocket the kickstarter money and
disappear?

~~~
epaga
Donating to Kickstarter gives you no guarantees whatsoever. The guy can
basically just walk away with the money if he so decides. No, really.

This however makes it all the more a powerful concept in my mind, since the
"makers" have to figure out how to communicate they are trustworthy AND have
this great idea.

------
easterisle
I think these communities are worried about the culture they've created
becoming more commercialized than it already is?

~~~
Zarkonnen
Absolutely. I have this theory that part of the reason that meme culture is
often so absurd, obscure and frequently offensive exactly to prevent its co-
option and commercialization.

~~~
Jimmie
Case and point: Two years ago Hot Topic started selling "rage guy" t-shirts.
The internet decided it would be having none of that and coerced the meme
"rage guy" into "race guy" by pumping out tonnes of racist comics. Hot Topic
were forced to withdraw its t-shirt range.

<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/race-guy>

~~~
tedunangst
I don't really track Hot Topics current inventory, but the same page you link
to says they unwithdrew it one day later.

~~~
Jimmie
Huh, I didn't know that. I was working from memory and didn't read the
article. I wonder if they still sell the shirts?

------
jamesu
The thing to remember is that behind every meme is a person. Someone spent
time and effort to make a funny image or story, and they probably never got
paid for it. Then someone comes along and tries to make money off of it: how
would you feel?

~~~
polemic
You don't own a meme. Heck, that's almost an oxymoron:

"an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within
a culture" \- <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meme>

And who actually makes money from meme's anyway? Is YouTube scum for making
money from showing video memes? Likewise for 4chan (the website, not the
community) and Reddit? The advertisers that buy ads on those pages? What about
memegenerators?

Double standards?

~~~
smashing
The obvious answer is that the content being discussed isn't really a meme.
They are copyrighted images. The idea of a "Troll Face" can be a meme, surely,
but the specific image of a trollface that is widely recognized was obviously
copyrighted. If you don't like that then create your own image and release it
with a more permissive license like Public Domain.

------
tocomment
I really couldn't follow this. Can anyone explain it?

------
beernutz
Please don't let the haters hold you back. The entire creative world is awash
with re-mixes. This is nothing to be ashamed of or to avoid. Contrary to what
some seem to believe, NOTHING is created in a vacuum. Everyone is influenced
by others. The extent to which you show your influences in your work is really
just part of your creative process in my opinion.

I hope you find a way to make your game regardless of all the "original"
people that think they are better somehow than those who are re-mixing to
create something new with the culture they love.

------
mcmonkey
I thought the video was funny, and when I read your post I just assumed that
it would turn out that the art studio that you were going to hire turned out
to have made the video as advertising for your game.

To me it looks like awesome advertising, and it turns out that you got it for
free, so why not just be happy? Ignore the trolls and see it from the bright
side. =)

------
hallnoates
I can't believe anyone is taking this seriously. This was the guy's strongest
critic:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2LmjiTduSe0)

Regardless of their position on the matter, they are all attention whores.

------
internetcitizen
Off the top of my head, this already worked for...

CollegeHumor - Cashed out. EbaumsWorld - Cashed out. Knowyourmeme - Cashed
out. The entire Cheezeburger network.

------
jiggy2011
So, wait a minute.

People draw some crappy pictures or take a crappy photo and slap an average
joke over the top spread it around the internet and then get annoyed that
someone puts it in a game?

Why aren't they going after the people who endlessly re-post these things?

------
avar
The Internet gives douchebags a soapbox, news at 11.

------
zotz
> Most of what Internet communities like 4chan, Reddit, and 9gag produce are
> highly-regarded garbage.

Why does he want to smear poor, innocent garbage? At least garbage composts
into something useful.

------
nomaningme
In the future, everyone will be threatened with death for 15 minutes.

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paulhauggis
I got death threats when I followed the open source license, but tried to make
money on my own app. It utilized an app under the GNU license.

The problem with open source (especially anything involving the GNU) is that
although you can make money, the majority (not all) will make it very
difficult for you to do this.

------
funkah
Right, all those communities are garbage because they were mean to you. But
you're still gonna make your little game from the images and ideas those
communities traffic in. So, what does that make your game?

------
i_cannot_hack
Say what you will about it, but Whynne's recording was actually genuinely
funny.

