Actually what you find baffling is very old practice already. Long before you joined Reddit top redditors already charged (anywhere between $120 and $300) to submit a post. A good reddit post could after all send more than 30,000 hits within the first two hours. After that it merely depended on how good the linked work was as not every submission stayed on the frontpage for a long time.

But this wasn’t solely a thing on Reddit. Before Reddit, there was Digg. A good post on Digg’s frontpage could send the same 30,000 and then some. Digg frontpage posts have known to hit 180k views in a day. And some top diggers would take the odd “request”... at a fee obviously.

But that was not solely an issue to the Web2.0.

Sites like kottke, the drudgereport, daringfireball, and so many more are mostly curation sites. Curation with an added paragraph of commentary and every blue moon an own essay. Even now those sites have hundreds of thousands of followers and while especially those mentioned are ethical and don’t take payment to be curated they make thousands a month. From curating great content in their niche.

Boingboing.net anyone?

Now thousands of early day “bloggers”, people publishing and curating online long before blogging was popular a term, have eventually sold their site because a blog network thought it fitted their profile and their audience would bring a decent traffic boost and thus increase in ads rate card (yes, there was a time that views mattered for ads pricing). Or they sold to some SEO link farm company who loved the page rank of that site.

The internet has never been able to survive without others sharing discovered content. Curation is an integral pillar to the internet. The internet has also always made money from curation, whether that was from ads, direct payment for curation, or selling their site or account... it ALWAYS was a thing online. And tbh, for those who put in the effort and went the distance, it was much more rewarding — pun intended — than Steem is. Right now Steem is mostly a pay to self reward platform.