Dang. This is one I can speak to. Back around 2008 or so I was at a friend's college dorm and we spent an entire day watching a Mad Men marathon on AMC. This was long before binge watching, when an actor was either in movies, on HBO, or on bleh cable, so it felt like a cultural shift to me that we were all so enamored by this show. When I got home I typed in /r/television to see if maybe this was something others were talking about, but I discovered it was an abandoned subreddit full of soap opera gossip. So I messaged the user that created it, who eventually came around and saw my message, and he let me take it over. He didn't leave the subreddit so he was always top in the hierarchy, but I personally took full ownership. I spent years designing and enforcing rules discouraging things like downvotes, requiring people to submit the source instead of blogspam/clickbait, disallowing memes/image posts, banning any form of hate speech, etc. This was _not_ the norm on Reddit at the time. This was the era of /r/pics. Most passerbys hated it, it really didn't even follow the whole idea of Reddit as a whole, but the ones that stayed were awesome and it seriously just grew and grew and grew. Critics like Alan Sepinwall were practically gods there and guided a lot of the discussion throughout those years, and the AV Club was largely ignored.
I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.
This is something I've always thought about Uber- they're just a courier service that happens to deliver people. The reason taxi drivers are unhappy with them has never really made sense to me since the oh-so-expensive taxi medallion gives them the right to pick up people hailing them from the side of the street. All of the problems consumers have with taxis are because they're trying to use them as a car service to schedule rides and go further than just the downtown area of a city.
They seem to have backed off, but last I looked at them they were just trying to coin every single food phrase as some new facet of their infastructure. "Sprinkle a dash of seasoning to your soup to make a recipe and build a cookbook, or order delivery instead!". I felt like a housewife getting sold to by a door to door salesman.
I think most people's bias against this article will kick in the moment they see a Wordpress parallax theme as the first thing featured. Or maybe the huge bold font for body text...
I ended up taking a little hiatus from the Internet and left some mods I trusted in control, and when I went back after a few months I discovered the original mod had let Reddit take it over and install their own team to make it a default subreddit. Why wouldn't they? Now, it is what it is. Still, I look at it and know I designed that logo, I wrote the rules that have been repurposed and are buried in some wiki that nobody reads, and I wrote the stylesheet for the sidebar. Oh well.