RE: Steem Needs to Go Mainstream! Let’s Bring over 200 Million Meme Lovers Worldwide to Steem! dMania Makes it Possible !!! Together We Can Do This !!!
Like Steemit, dMania is a website and a community for sharing content. If that content is original depends and how you define original content. Most of the content on Steemit isn't original content either. It's some information or media that someone saw, heard or found somewhere on the internet. That's how social media or the whole internet works. If you change that content, is it really original content? Truly original content is rare or doesn't even exist. Every information, picture or video is based on the ideas and work of someone else.
If you post some news from a website or use a picture that you found somewhere for your post, you are essentially profiting off of someone else's work. It isn't possible to reward the original author. That's how the internet works. I think it's important that the creator is rewarded, but shouldn't be the one who shares that content be rewarded too. Too many people here claim that they create original content when all they do is take information and share it.
In my opinion the most important thing is that content is shared. If you create something unique and nobody sees it, it's the worst thing that can happen to the creator. Even worse than plagiarism.
I don't say that reposts or plagiarism are a good thing. But people have to differentiate between plagiarism and sharing. It's only plagiarism if you claim the work of somebody else as your own.
On dMania you are rewarded for sharing, because it is not possible to find out if you are actually the original creator.
For memes plagiarism just doesn't exist. A meme is a joke in form of a picture. Like in real life, you can't claim a joke as your own work. Nobody knows who actually created it. Nobody even cares. The important thing is that the joke is shared and brings fun and joy for everybody else.
The flaw in your logic is that sharing something does not equate to compulsory monetary compensation. There is a difference between a sale and sharing. I'm not necessarily talking about plagiarism.
If I share my lunch with you, do I ask you to pay for half? Maybe. But that's a contract agreed upon by both parties, verbal, informal, or otherwise.
Yeah, sharing is great, but I don't agree that people should be financially compensated for sharing work that isn't created by themselves. At least not without having explicit permission from the original content creator.
For example, you can promote this practice on Steemit by only upvoting posts where the author is also the artist or creator of that content. If there's great content already made and you want to share it, resteem it.
The fact that people are abusing Steemit in this way already is irrelevant to my initial point: Steemit already has a mechanism in place to devalue posts like this, which is an incentive for people to use it. Whether or not people do, is another conversation.
To rephrase my initial point in the form of a question: How does creating a whole platform for people to make money off of memes benefit society? What kind of a culture are you promoting? Even if you don't know who made the meme, what gives you the right to make money off of it instead?
...If the point is just to have fun as you say, then leave it on 9Gag and let everyone have fun - that's not the problem here. The problem is that the second you introduce monetary (or other) compensation for fun that relies on other people's work it becomes a whole new ball game and is asking for trouble in the long run.
I can't stop the internet obviously (and nor do I want to) - I'm only bringing up this argument for the sake of food for thought.