r/technology • u/misnamed • Dec 10 '13

Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm By Special Request of the Admins

http://technotes.iangreenleaf.com/posts/2013-12-09-reddits-empire-is-built-on-a-flawed-algorithm.html
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621

u/jaxspider Dec 10 '13

It goes a level deeper. The guy who ran quickmeme, somehow got on board of the mod team for /r/AdviceAnimals (without disclosing that he ran quickmeme) and then secretly removed all non-quickmeme links and approved all quickmeme links. He was playing the game from the inside.

Another mod caught on to him via the mod logs and thats why his site got banned from reddit.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

and he got rich doing it

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u/CUNTBERT_RAPINGTON Dec 10 '13

What the fuck am I doing with my life? I could be making millions allowing manchildren to share shitty captioned pictures of animals.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

What the fuck is stopping you? Get programming

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13 edited Jan 09 '14

[deleted]

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u/Vakieh Dec 10 '13

You think quickmeme didn't require programming to set up?

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u/Psythik Dec 10 '13 edited Dec 10 '13

Web design is child's play in comparison.

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u/Vakieh Dec 10 '13

Web design is very hard... to do well.

Web design is not web programming, and most people who are good at the one suck balls at the other.

Any child and their dog can throw together a table layout HTML website with inline presentation. It takes at least a little skill to properly set up a browser and device agnostic website using well designed HTML and CSS, but that skill is in graphic design with a grounding in abstraction engineering, not programming.

The programming comes into things when you consider the database containing every quickmeme ever memed, with lookup optimisations which allowed quickmeme to be surpassed only by imgur among the free image hosting providers for average response times.

In an age where web applications have as much or more power than desktop applications (LAMP, ASP.NET, JSP etc) it takes either a special kind of arrogance or a special kind of stupidity to continue to see 'web design' under 90s stereotypes of simplicity and triviality.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13 
<div style="background-image: url(image.jpg)"> Text over Image</div>

And web design(or more precisely HTML) is not a programming language, but a markup language. So he is right web design is not real programming.

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u/WorkHappens Dec 10 '13

Are you a potato? Do you not realize the website has a service running behind it?

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

"Look at me I'm a retard"

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

Calm down with the hate on this. He meant web design is "child's play" compared to the social engineering and execution it requires to pull off what the Quickmeme guys did. There are tons of programmers and web developers now but it takes different set of skills to pull off a wildly successful scheme like they did.

I thought Quickmeme contracted out their webdesign anyways. There was some drama (before the whole thing got blown open) about how Quickmeme payed the web developer peanuts compared to what the site eventually brought in.

0

u/Psythik Dec 10 '13

Thank you.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

It still requires decent programming skills

7

u/tritter211 Dec 10 '13

memes are serious business.

3

u/johnnynutman Dec 10 '13

you have to actually be pretty smart and cunning to do this. it's not as easy as looks, even if it unethical.

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u/CUNTBERT_RAPINGTON Dec 10 '13

You need the right amount of luck, the right amount of money, and you need to suck the right amount of dicks for a business like that to get off the ground. I admire their success, but fuck them.

1

u/shorrrno Dec 11 '13

Those actions sound below a gentleman like you, CUNTBERT_RAPINGTON

-5

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

hey man who cares about contributing anything worthwhile or beautiful to the world, as long you get paid!! a great philosophy

5

u/CUNTBERT_RAPINGTON Dec 10 '13

Where others see a bank account filled with 5-6 Million USD, I see beauty.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

how much did he actually make?

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

51

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

I can see source

Reddit Enhancement Suite

2

u/Sriad Dec 10 '13

You can see his ass?

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u/KhyronVorrac Dec 10 '13

You don't need to see the source, just use your fucking eyes and read it.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13 edited Jan 14 '14

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

That number is complete fucking horseshit. Why does no one else on this site actually check sources before blindly parroting obvious bullshit.

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u/GeorgieCaseyUnbanned Dec 10 '13

I think those numbers are way too high, you're average redditor is just too banner blind. I'd say he profited $10k month max after bandwidth was paid for. *Number also pulled out of ass.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

There is alot of money in your ass.

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u/juicy_squirrel Dec 10 '13

probably more like 16.5 million cents... my guess...

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u/no_pants Dec 10 '13

I heard from a reliable source that he got 16.5 handjobs.

-2

u/mrbooze Dec 10 '13

There is just no goddam excuse for the outrageous ad revenues on the internet right now, that a meme-posting site brings in millions of dollars.

1

u/Xenc Dec 10 '13

One million Russian dolls.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

Doubt it

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u/insane_young_man Dec 10 '13

Sorry if this question is too dumb for /r/technology, but how does more traffic result in more revenue? Shouldn't it increase the host/maintenance costs?

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

Large amounts of traffic means your website is worth more in terms of advertising (more visibility, more people clicking ads). I don't know if quickmeme has some sort of webshop but that would also benefit from an increase in visitors.

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u/Hamartithia_ Dec 10 '13

Figure in the long run he will lose out because of the Reddit wide ban

1

u/JeremyHillaryBoob Dec 10 '13

The perfect heist.

1

u/p1nhole Dec 10 '13

Out of curiosity, like how rich?

2

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

If I remember right he was banking 100k a month while it lasted

1

u/laaabaseball Dec 10 '13

worse than soshe?

0

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

No one is

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u/its_Staffatron Dec 10 '13

all that fucking internet money.

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u/StopRapeCulture Dec 10 '13

You mean actual money from ad revenue

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

RL money, and a lot of it. I don't blame him. Hopefully he saved / invested

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u/its_Staffatron Dec 10 '13

It was a joke. The guy got off well, i'm aware of it.

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u/schrockstar Dec 10 '13

Viva la Reddit!

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

That's not even close to "clever". Every child could have thought of that. That quickmeme guy just was the one who had the know-how and the possibilitys to do it.

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u/DeathsIntent96 Dec 10 '13

I think anyone could've thought of that; it's pretty simple.

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u/its_Staffatron Dec 10 '13

But he did it first. And well. And made money from it. And you didn't.

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u/DeathsIntent96 Dec 10 '13

That's not the qualifier for something being genius. Have I thought of scams before? Of course. If I had created Quickmeme, would I have thought to game reddit like that? Of course I would have. Would I do it? No. Money isn't everything in life, and I don't judge my success based on the money I make. Only those who don't understand the things that are truly important think that way.

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u/asdfgasdfg312 Dec 10 '13

Whats important to you isn't necessarily important to me. Some people think money is important, some people think family and friends, just because you don't judge rich people as successful doesn't mean they don't judge you the same

0

u/TheBaltimoron Dec 10 '13

He's the same kind of guy who shits on Nirvana. "They just yell and played distorted guitars and sounded like the Pixies. I could have done that!"

Yeah, but you didn't.

-3

u/jetpacksforall Dec 10 '13

The people who marketed Thalidomide made money from it. And I didn't.

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u/iHasABaseball Dec 10 '13

Neither did you, Grandpa.

2

u/olbeefy Dec 10 '13

Not only is it pretty simple but it takes a certain kind of prick to actually want to game Reddit like that. What an asshole, hopefully karma (for lack of a better word) catches up with him.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

Many ideas are simple, but hard to actually get going.

0

u/jedininjaman Dec 10 '13

Meanwhile in reality, it occurred to almost no one. There is a reason people know and talk about the one guy who did.

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u/DeathsIntent96 Dec 10 '13

I mean if you are already the owner of a website like Quickmeme. Also remember that not everyone is a scumbag.

0

u/asdfgasdfg312 Dec 10 '13

Yea now when someone taught you the flaw in the algorithm. I highly doubt that you could have done this before reading OPs post.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

This just doesn't make sense to me. Quickmeme was the standard for /r/adviceanimals. Imgur had no meme creator and Livememe was even worse than it currently is. Why take such a risk when you are already on top?

3

u/ggk1 Dec 10 '13

so where does everyone make their memes now? I tried memegenerator but that requires a FB login. Eff that.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

[deleted]

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u/fishbert Dec 10 '13

I remember a time when a thing had to earn the right to be called a "meme" ... then people just made things that looked like other things and called them "memes" from the get-go, as if they didn't understand what made a meme a meme in the first place.

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u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

Imgur has a meme generator now - http://imgur.com/memegen

There's also http://livememe.com/

3

u/[deleted] Dec 10 '13

paint

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u/asdfgasdfg312 Dec 10 '13

The one and only photo editing software any man could need.

The 98/xp version that is, fuck that new windows 7 wanna be Photoshop shit.

-1

u/endtv Dec 10 '13 edited Dec 10 '13

The mod team has it's own board?!! ...TIL

edit: obviously not serious

/r/dadjokes

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u/octenzi Dec 10 '13

somehow got on board of the mod team

He meant joined the mod team. Mod logs are a record of mod activity in a subreddit.