Quite a random way how I stumbled upon this so I figured I'd show my steps before I get into the issue at hand.
I was browsing r/videos which somehow is still one of the few subreddits that allows direct sharing to youtube, anyway there was a random glitch and it started showing top posts from 5-6 years ago (the top-all time algo) kicked in half-way into my scroll of the daily top videos.
So scrolling some more, feeling nostalgic about some submissions I hadn't seen in quite a while as an avid Reddit user (especially before I found out about steem/hive) I found and remember this wholesome share:
I didn't re-watch it but I remembered how nice it was at the time to see this post trending, thousands of comments and millions of views to this little content creator of only 70 subscribers. Reddit's "hug of love" at the time as they used to call it. I decided to check how his recent videos have been doing, just curious if he continued creating content, if a lot of subscribers he got from Reddit back then stayed around, got him more views and possibly new subscribers, etc. After seeing that the video posted above was sitting at 17M views you can imagine what kind of life-changing revenue that may have created for this person.
Turns out he's still getting views and doing quite alright:
I even checked out his recent video and then cross-checked that bike he was reviewing on other reviews if it's something I should consider for my health. :P
Anyway, it got me thinking as to how Reddit was back then and what it has become now (mostly, although this subreddit does seem to have stayed true or not been strongarmed by admins or something to change their ways like others have).
I remember there were certain content creators back in the day who'd steal a lot of content and post them to Facebook when it first introduce adrevenue to content creators. I'm not really sure what they were called but most of them did some low effort garbage theft basically, stuff we on Hive would for sure downvote if we saw on trending and taking a lot of revenue.
Their basis would pretty much be, take a video from youtube, reddit or other platforms, most of the time being original content, preface it with a short clip of your dumb face saying something like "me when I am sad:" que full video of the other person then maybe add an outro or something. Boom 50M views and millions in adrevenue for having provided jack shit yourself.
This got brought up on Reddit and it sparked a lot of hate and debates, I think Facebook even took a stance on it and started demonetizing such content creators. The argument was pretty much that it was quite lazy editing, not really a "reaction" video, etc, and most of the time undeserving of such revenue. Who knows how these content creators even got their starting push to begin with, as I've said in the past and something that still stands true, a lot of views, traffic and engagement is cheap and easy to fake on web2. Wouldn't be surprised if this is how they get their start until people just follow because everyone else is and it takes over from there.
Now let me tell you how Reddit has evolved since then. I'm not exactly sure how it progressed this way or the exact steps of Reddit when it went public, etc, but it wouldn't surprise me if my suspicion is correct in that it's all about adrevenue, traffic and maintaining their high internet rank of usage.
So at one point Reddit kind of parted ways with imgur.com who was a big help for them starting out and decided to self-host. Suddenly you see a lot of the big subreddits not sharing to other well-established social media platforms or websites of artists, content creators, etc, but just upload and share to reddit directly. The crazy part to me, is that in many of these subreddits you're not even allowed to link to the artist/original creator in the comments and I do have my suspicions on that as well.
Basically what I think is happening here is "adrevenue is king", so let's say if what happened in the example used in the beginning of the post were to happen again today here's what would occur instead:
Reddit user downloads the video, uploads it to Reddit, gives it a title and hits post. Redditors consume the content, generate comments and the sharer may not even be the original creator of the video. Nothing changes from Reddit's perspective but a lot changes from the content creator's.
Let's take a look at the difference.
Reddit now has even more consumers, even more engagement than they did 5-6 years ago. Let's say this content creator has created something amazing that has taken him a really long time and effort so the praise and attention he's getting is well deserved. The shitty thing here now is that all this attention, views, praise all gets locked within Reddit, the creator won't see a dime from it unless people for some reason decide to donate or ask for the content creator's name or link (which often isn't allowed to be posted). The content creators loses out on potential millions of views, thousands of subscribers and an incalculable amount of future adrevenue had all of the previous happened like back then.
You may start to wonder, why would Reddit do this, though? Why self-host which is expensive when they could just let people link to youtube, Instagram, artstation, websites, etc? Well, I think the answer is pretty simple, if you go to Youtube to check out this video rather than watching it embeddable on Reddit, you may get tricked into checking out another video, staying longer on youtube and potentially forgetting to go back to Reddit. Woops, that's one brain lost that could've generated us more adrevenue and our shareholders more fuel for their yachts! Can't have that!
You really gotta imagine that this must be something they've calculated that they rather self-host than lose out on potential consumers this way, the adrevenue has to outweigh the hosting costs and they come at the cost of the content creator.
Reddit even has "original content" from time to time but it's not as popular, you can maybe imagine why. Why the fuck would I upload my content on their hosting on their website while having their moderators tell me I can't post a link to maybe get some traffic or followers who are consuming and liking my work to keep seeing it and supporting me with their attention and views. I have to keep posting my work on Reddit forever like this and only getting a fraction of the traffic I deserve? All other socials are starting to do the same?
I mean, at the end of the day, even if the OC video gets a nice amount of traction on Youtube itself before it gets shared in other socials by other people for useless internet points, it'll never do as well as it could have had it not been shared on the other socials or had it been shared properly by linking to the actual video on the platform he posted it to to get him the views and revenue he deserved. Instead you'll now have people who'd jump from Reddit to Youtube and see that video in recommendations and think "oh I've already seen it" or "I've already reddit, eheheheh", fuck you. This shit really makes me angry cause it's like these giants in their competitiveness with each other to attempt to keep traffic within and greed are fucking over the actual content creators more and more.
You may think I'm exaggerating but I've experienced this myself first hand, my girlfriend @hiddenblade shared a piece of art she once created in the biggest art subreddit by uploading the piece on their hosting service and it got to trending and she figured she could include a comment with a link to her insta and hive (steem at the time) but was told it wasn't fucking allowed and that they deleted the comment.
Having said that it doesn't seem like it's a platform wide strongarm, not sure how moderators are incentivized to uphold these kinds of rules or what the mods themselves would even gain or lose from that, so all hope isn't lost in regards to @poshtoken on Reddit. But they sure don't make it easy. A website that was created around sharing content of the internet, discussing it, evaluating it with their own system of upvotes and downvotes don't fucking let you share content outside of it anymore. What a joke.
Here on Hive we may get downvoted for not sourcing an image or video to the original creator, or to at least make sure we credit them properly while the rest of #web2 is just evolving backwards due to greed and maximization of the traffic they've garnered over the years. If anything I want Hive to get big for this factor alone, to value the people that deserve it in the best ways it can and fuck over those greedy middlemen company shareholder dickheads.
