No, the core problem is the Glastonbury Fryers are all there has ever been, and every now and then they pull someone aside and say "here's minimum wage, how'd you like to be responsible for this travesty?" Anyone who has ever volunteered at a festival can guess how that works. Alexis and Steve are die-hard libertarians. They firmly believe that if you structure it properly it will run itself... and if what's there isn't working, then it hasn't adapted to the structure properly. Reddit reflects the culture it can afford, which is a poorly-run volunteer-heavy staff-light cacophony of unbridled IdSpeak. Back when it had 100th as many people you could still hear occasional brilliance but it's long since been drowned out by the chavs.
"What is honoured in a country will be cultivated there". I would argue that any large website, or website with a culture, is functionally analogous to a country in Plato's sense of the word. What does reddit honour? It honours "Gotcha" journalism (even of itself), it honours celebrity, it honours bite-sized knowledge. It honours theft of intellectual and artistic property. And it honours most of all the idea that they deserve that content for free. I can see why they have the culture they have - they've hoed the rows themselves, and their crop has come to fruition.
I imagine it's how reddit hates self-promotion, but loves people finding new content. You end up with, in general, people only liking something if the original creator didn't post it. That can then create an incentive to find and maybe even steal things across the internet. The other way I could see it is the much more generalized internet idea that piracy is ok.
keopi has the core of it. Think of it this way - how much do you think the photographers of the photos on /r/gentlemanboners are getting paid for those imgur links? The answer is, of course, a big fat goose egg. Every picture on the internet was taken by someone. When it comes to high quality photos, odds are that the person who took that photo makes a living at it (or uses it as supplementary income). If you're reposting that picture without permission, you are - under the law - using their intellectual property without permission, which is illegal in most western societies. This is one of the reasons that digital content is so undervalued in comparison to physical content - It's so easily replicable at an identical quality that it makes it almost valueless. And of course, we can't rely on people to not replicate, because people want pretty stuff, but don't want to play for it. We're like the people of Mozart's Vienna - "Generous with their praise, but not with their wallets"
Thanks for elaborating on that. I never thought of it this way, I must admit. It's so easy and simple to share digital stuff! I imagine this is among the main reasons people do so quite as eagerly, Reddit or not Reddit. Which isn't to say that Reddit has it as well as the rest of the 'Net: no, it's much worse on Reddit. What I don't think, still, is that Reddit despises original content in any way. Sure, sharing what you've found is fun, but there's plenty of OC to go around, as my experience tells me. /r/dota2, for example, has plenty OC on its main page every day, as silly or plain stupid as said content may be.
Hotlinking has been considered rude since forever, mirroring to imgur is, or at least was initially, about being polite and not giving some random site the hug of death when it can easily be avoided. Mozart was talking about patronage, not rent seeking via artificial scarcity. All the overfunded indiegogo/paetron projects say patronage can work again without beating the audience into submission with the law. That said, I would love to see every record executive and movie producer selling pencils on street corners. I have no sympathy for the industries that gave us DRM and the DMCA. May they die, and may they take the advertisers with them.
so far as I can tell, Mozart never said it. I was quoting my music history teacher (who, admittedly, may have been paraphrasing from some of Mozart's private correspondance, or a Mozart scholar). Also, Mozart was unique in that he was one of the first composers to strike out on his own and NOT have a single specific patron. Unlike Haydn or J.C. Bach - both of whom taught him - he was not a servant of a court. He had private patrons, yes, but they're more comparable to Patreon than they are to other actual Patrons of the time. For example, Mozart owned his music - the Esterhazy estate owned (and still does own) Haydn's music. I understand you're talking about broader reach of media companies, but I'm mostly talking about professionals in the industry, not companies. There is no "Big Nature Photography" like there is "Big Record Companies" - Unless you count National Geographic, maybe? Getty Images, I guess, but they're usually more about photos of people. we hotlink here all the time. Granted, we are MUCH smaller than reddit. However, this is not even really the point, the point is that often the people posting won't even cite the artist - they're not even giving due credit.Mozart was talking about patronage, not rent seeking via artificial scarcity.
I have no sympathy for the industries that gave us DRM and the DMCA.
Hotlinking has been considered rude since forever,
Yeah, you caught me, I just assumed you were referring to something Mozart said. But "give Mozart some cash so he can do his thing" is a very different thing than "let Mozart sue anyone who doesn't give him cash before listening to his music into oblivion." The former is great and good; I buy a lot of music because I have the money and want to throw a tip in the jar, and pretending I'm buying a product is the only means available to do it. That latter is not so good; fuck that imaginary Mozart, he's not worth it.
What is honoured in a culture will be cultivated there - even, as you say, a lack of cultivation.The bottom line is that if you want an herb garden with diversity, you need to keep the mint from taking over. If you want an herb garden that takes care of itself, don't bother planting anything but mint because after a couple years it'll be the only thing left.
Imgur has never been more than Imageshack or Tinypic with the profits sucked out. Now that they're pretending to be a big boy place they're trying to pump the profits back in. One of Reddit's worst mistakes was not buying that thing from MrGrim the day he created it.
Wow, I remember this conversation. This may have been the last thread I followed before I broke down and make my Hubski login in November 2013. I just, on a lark, googled my comments on reddit and looked for my name. I did a grand job of deleting my presence there; the only time my name shows up is in replies, and all of those are astronomy and work related, so all good on that front. My last mention was August 2014. The middle reddit, for me at least, was over. Ran that greasemonkey script to purge my profile and bailed. I care still because I have a sentimental attachment, but I don't contribute or give them page views any more.
I actually used to run an actual circus. All volunteers. One paid person, and the performers got a nightly stipend for each performance. We had 11 performers and about 30 volunteers, total, 9 of which actually did any work. Looking at Reddit through this lens, I am somewhat baffled by how well it actually works! :-)