How is this even legal?

I'm looking at some of the subreddits lately, most of the big ones are filled with rules and guidelines and all sorts of things. I used to love Reddit back in the day, my account is now over 8 years old and has over 130k karma where most of it is comment karma, i.e. I didn't just spam random links I found on the internet in hopes to get upvotes for link karma but instead attempted to comment, reply and focus on interaction with fellow Redditors much like my Steem activity early on. Except that here you made some rewards for good curation and on certain comments (not so much early on, though).

The way I saw Reddit in the day was a way for people to come together, share links, discuss them and enjoy the imaginary internet points if others liked your activity. At the same time everyone knew it was garnering a lot of attention and a lot of people were using it. There were often times when someone would link to a youtube video of an underrated content creator and it would just blow up on Reddit and the Youtuber would see a spike in viewcount and his video filled with positive comments and the popular "I got here from Reddit" ones. It was nice, it felt like the right amount of people at the right place at the right time did something nice for a content creator who was just starting out but wasn't getting the attention he deserved cause of the lack of marketing, attention or curation on that platform, but Reddit did it right. Similarly someone would post an image of a comic creator and people would love it, you'd see comments asking for more, who the creator is, what his website was, etc.

Where I'm going with this is that the real creators were compensated for the entertainment they gave to a big crowd, while the person who shared it only gained some internet points it didn't matter - his job did not take a lot of time thus he wasn't expecting to make money off of it.

Over time Reddit started gaining more and more popularity, if someone would ask me where it all started my best guess would be the r/IAMA which for those who don't know was a subreddit growing in popularity that started off with certain people having unique jobs, having gone through a unique experience or being interesting in general making a post telling others their story and letting anyone ask them anything and put some time into answering the people. As it became more popular and others started realizing how much attention there was on Reddit and the effects it could have on marketing, the subreddit started seeing more and more celebrities and famous people sign up and make IAMA threads. It became so popular that they had to use a calendar as to not push too many into the same time. Some of the most famous ones I can think of right now were President Obama, Bill Gates and the famous for the wrong reasons Woody Harrelson for his movie Rampart. The latter backfired as he kept avoding many questions and kept repeating the phrase "let's get back to talking about Rampart", it made it obvious that he was just there to promote his movie, not to give time to his fans or the Reddit community and meet them halfway. As you can imagine when the internet gets all up in arms they went ahead and rekt the reviews of that movie possibly leading to very crappy sales of it.

In one way one could understand the anti-marketing feeling of most Redditors, especially those that had been there since the early beginnings and only wanted what was best for the site. Many subreddits started having rules against self-promotion or the golden "only 1 out of 10 submissions may be self-promotion" in their rediquette, although I am not sure if that is still a thing. Most people agreed with this and the current owners of Reddit seemed to have the best interest in mind for the community, little to no ads, a way to donate "gold" to certain posts which would go directly to paying for servers so it can keep running and everything was nice and cozy.

Things started to change, though. The new CEO of Reddit made it pretty clear that now that they had reached a big userbase and a very high traffic rank, it was time to cash in on it. The site quickly became riddled with ads "oh well I'll just use adblock" - the site became riddled with "promotional posts" as well. As they were moving to maximizing their adrevenue, get in more and more stakeholders to buy Reddit they were constantly looking for ways to increase it.

How could that be done? Well one way is to make sure people using Reddit would not leave the site. Imgur which had been an image hosting service that Reddit relied heavily on in the beginning was not needed anymore as Reddit started it's own Image hosting. Then also Gif and Video hosting. Now there was no reason to for any consumers on Reddit to leave it as everything they wanted to consume existed there, a subreddit for everything, most people they knew had accounts there now which they were able to follow, etc.

Here is where things get a bit sad though, these new changes to get people to stay on Reddit for as much as possible and the rules in turn added to some of the most popular subreddits like the one I mentioned in the beginning r/art made it so it was also hard to give recognition or credit or any sort of revenue to the real creator of anything. Think about it, it is becoming impossible to credit the real creator for the attention/entertainment millions are getting.

There's been so many cases where somebody shares someone's work, people ask in the comments who made it, where it is from, etc and the sharer may not even know or care enough to find out and answer, they may just be farming karma to sell their account later, this issue for another post though, people like to complain about bots and stuff we have here on a open and public blockchain clearly have no idea of the black market deals and shit that goes on on a private and centralized database where only some people can check what exactly happened and if activity was fake or not, if they even suspect something to begin with that makes them look.

I've seen cases where the original creator had to make a new account and start answering people that it's his work, of course at the same time being limited by the "nospam" limits that new accounts face where they can only comment once every 9-10 minutes and if they get downvoted it may increase until they hit a certain karma amount and can comment more - for those of you crying about RC limitations.

It's just baffling to me that someone can share your post, make a bunch of useless internet points he maybe can sell his account for on the black market later on, people reward this person with "gold" that directly goes back to Reddit, it attracts so much attention and possibly new people through Google SEO which all goes back to Reddit through adrevenue and the real artist may not get a cent off of that or any new followers because they don't want people to leave the site so they autodelete or downvote links to sources. Like what the fuck?

I remember the era when Facebook started paying content creators and the majority used to just steal Youtube videos and post them as their own, getting millions of likes, shares and adrevenue and the real Youtube creator found out about it later and could not do anything about it. Not only did it degrade his great video cause by this point a lot of people had already seen it and were not going to re-watch it even though they happen to find out who the real creator is and where the credit should go to - they may as well have missed out on their chance of going viral or gaining a lot of popularity cause someone from another platform just stole your content and made a lot of money off of it. Do you think Facebook cared? They got a cut off of the revenue anyway, sure they may have given the thief a slap on the wrist but it's not like they were going to flat out ban them, even if they did they would just create a new account and restart the whole process.

It can't be completely compared to Reddit but it's kind of this sensation that happens when people are incentivized with money and the platform they are on that recently starts these monetizations is much bigger or easier to game than the platform they were originally posted on. Now think about each individual artist with their 100-10,000 followers and how much daily revenue, attention and credit they may be losing out on in each genre, not just video, gifs, tiktoks, vines or what have you, but in everything because there is a subreddit for everything.

Compare Steem to Reddit where we go out of our way to check that an account is posting original content before curating it with a guild or our own stake and then open a few more doors to check that it's not just an ID thief pretending to be a content creator by contacting the real artist and asking if they are this user. It's a damn shame we don't get more credit for that while other websites make a ton of money off of stolen content.

Anyway, this got pretty long and borderline ranty, doubt many read this far and I've also been on a rolling spree posting lately so I forgive you if you didn't. :P