 "Reddit bans Quickmeme on charges of vote manipulation")
There’s trouble brewing in the Reddit paradise. Popular meme generation service Quickmeme has been banned across subreddits on the social news website. It has been charged with allegedly using bots to quash traffic to any other meme website.
Reddit users post links to various third-party websites, especially when it comes to memes. Despite the fact that Imgur is used very widely to host images, meme creators like Livememe and Quickmeme were used to create text-on-stock-images kind of posts.
The subreddit that features most of these memes, r/AdviceAnimals, was the hot bed of this controversy. It was discovered that Quickmeme had used bots across the site to manipulate the system to quash traffic directing to other meme websites in order to drive up traffic to its own.
“Scumbag Quickmeme”
According to some moderators on the subreddit, one of their colleagues by the name of gtwo8 was found to be affiliated to one or both brothers who owned Miltz Media, Quickmeme’s parent company. A user named jokes_on_you discovered the rigging.
“Submissions in the morning US time get the most views because they are on the front page during reddit’s most active period. So it is the best time to use vote bot,” jokes_on_you wrote. He explained that if the post does not get enough votes in the ’new” section of the website, it will never appear on the “top posts” of the hour. Thanks to this, the post might never reach the front page. “So 5 or 6 downvotes completely destroys a post’s chances of being seen by a large audience. I should state that the claim that they are using votebots is just alleged,” he added.
So now if you try to submit a Quickmeme link to Reddit, you will only see an error message that says “Quickmeme.com is not allowed on Reddit: Manipulation of Reddit.” The ban extends throughout the website now. It has finally given a chance to other meme generators like Livememe and Memedad to be under the limelight. Chalk one up for r/KarmaConspiracy!
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