9GAG: The Epitome of Thievery

I always thought 9GAG posts were pretty awesome. They were funny and unique and I loved the fact that they never ran out of new stuff. Frankly speaking, it amazed me to a great extent that a website should have so much content and yet maintain almost an equal standard for each of them. You've got to be one really funny team to keep posting hilarious memes and gifs every half an hour or so. 9Gag was the magical place where humor content never stopped presenting itself. Yes, that's what it all seemed like. That is, before I was introduced to the world of Reddit. So, why the sudden change of mind? Because I found out, much to my amusement, that 9GAG deliberately steals content from Reddit.

So how do they do it?  
What we've got here is not a repost bot but a group of administrators and staff working hard to steal. They take posts that appear on the front page of Reddit and post them on their site with a new caption and their logo to go with it.  And boy do they make their act look clean. They remove Reddit's watermark and manipulate the post time so that it seems as if it was uploaded prior to the original post on Reddit, 4Chan or Funny Junk. And that's not all. Whenever there's a comment with “Reddit” or “Reddit.com” in it that possibly points out the scam-poof, it's gone. Hey, wait a minute. What if you write something on your blog about that? Sorry to let you down, but 9GAG won't allow those links to their site and you'll end up getting redirected.
The problem with 9GAG is that, its user base doesn't fuel the site's content archive. When a user posts something, no matter how uniquely funny it is, there's a limit to the amount of popularity it will receive within a certain time period. That's expected and natural. But among these regular accounts are the ones run by admins who bypass the system to publicise the stolen content with a huge number of upvotes and comments.

But there is however, a plus side for the visitors of the site- they get organised content under a single page and it saves a lot of time and provides a good experience rather than having to go through separate sub-reddits and threads that look confusing. Make no mistake, that isn't an excuse.  
We know that all this sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory but believe us when we say, it really isn't. Detailed proof can be found on the link at the end of this article.
If the internet has proven anything then it is this: frauds don't end up with the hype they started with. It's not always about what you're giving to the readers but about how you're giving it. If you have to unethically steal, the question of whether or not you should have existed in the first place, comes to mind.

Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/zacju/
9gag_repost_machine_explained