18 August 2015
At the moment, there is a huge disconnect between the service (Instagram) the creators, (comedians, or those people using the comedians jokes), and the end users, (we the consumers). Talk to most people and they don’t think twice about who they follow, or where the pictures and quotes are coming from. They just want something that will amuse them every now and then when scrolling through their feed.
Users like @thefatjewish and @fuckjerry try to meet the needs of the end user by providing amusing images with no care of where the images come from or who should get credit for them. It really wouldn’t take much effort to give credit to whoever created these images, although it looks like @thefatjewish has gone back about a week to tag some of these images to credit the creators. I couldn’t tell you if these were changes he made after the backlash or not since I don’t actually follow him.
Brian Feldman at The Awl made a great point on Instagram’s own failings in these regards:
The Fat Jew and his ilk—Fuck Jerry, Beige Cardigan, Betches and other shitpic peddlers—have no doubt kept a lot of users coming back to Instagram, likely even a substantial portion of the three hundred million monthly active users that the site boasts. For years now, Instagram has served up sponsored posts to those users, bringing in revenue for itself and its parent company, Facebook, while taking little action in response to how users actually behave on its service. It believes that if it deprives users of certain tools, users will change their behavior to fit Instagram’s narrow view of how the service should work. It simply does not account for those that don’t. The Fat Jew might be hiding behind Instagram’s lack of functionality and profiting because of it, but he’s not the only one. Instagram is too.
On top of that, if @thefatjewish’s end goal is to enter the creative realm, which his failed Comedy Central deal would have me believe, then he should have been attempting to work with comedians and not against them. From everything I’ve ever read, comedians take plagarism and joke stealing seriously and making a name for yourself by doing just that probably means the other people in that space will end up wanting nothing to do with you.
With close to six million followers he could have been a great aggregator for these types of snippets, while giving credit to up and coming comedians who might not have been able to reach those end users otherwise. Instead, he has become an enemy to many great comedians.
Source: The Awl, The Next Web