It's not the same discussion. a lot more sites pay content creators now. There are many people that work hard on their content. Many sites are engaged in fostering hijacked content, and they quietly do nothing about it because it makes them a lot of untraceable money, a LOT more money than 9gag ever made off of stolen memes... Perhaps it should be called Content Laundering?

Reddit has even gone as far as to prohibit posting of OC by creators themselves by banning their posts and accounts when they post their own work, calling it "self promotion", while other accounts violate the rule with obvious immunity. They also ban subreddits after they are cultivated and curated too, many times for no good reason. I understand that spam needs to be controlled, but how moderation occurs on Reddit, it's totally not conducted in a normal nor reasonable manner at all.

Yeah, at least twice now a content creator friend of mine went viral (think tens of millions of views) without getting much of the traffic herself; the thieving accounts/networks captured almost all of the benefits. Having those taken down have proven to be almost impossible. It’s disgusting.

Edit: In addition, just recently she managed to ward off a blatant thief and finally drive traffic from another hit to herself. But the income lost to the thief in the first few days? Forget about it.

Agreed, also the fact that rehosted content often never points back to the source creator, which potentially robs OC creators of real followers and potential business leads that could likely support them through these harsh times, literally to line pockets of people that had nothing to do with the content creation process at all.

r/funny (mainly) is a symbiote to 9gag.

The other major subs are also filled with shallow/unsubstantial content

But if you keep out of those it is usually ok

And before 9gag, there was ebaumsworld