It's true. There's definitely a noticeable segment of bitter Reddit users who complain "they stole that content from Reddit", blissfully unaware of the irony that most of the things "stolen" from Reddit often didn't originate on Reddit either, but they like to squawk about BuzzFeed (as it's only theft when it happens -to- Reddit).
Maybe, but my negative view of BuzzFeed has nothing to do with Reddit since I barely go there. It's more the fact that BuzzFeed is the tabloid of the internet.
> Their newsroom has attracted some pretty big names as of late.
Considering that pretty much all of traditional journalism is now chasing Buzzfeed in style, it doesn't matter if you work for Buzzfeed or the imitators, you'll still be working at a place with the same basic approach. You might as well work at the one that is making the model work, rather than the ones that have latched on to it as the most recent attempt to slow their downward spiral.
As other users have pointed out, it's not particularly rare, because they produce good articles semi-regularly. We were discussing this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10405992.
Sites that are mostly junk but also put out the occasional good story are a significant problem for HN. We can't ban them, because losing good stories is worse than tolerating bad ones (the latter are annoying, but get flagged). Our solution is to penalize them, review the stories, and take the penalty off the good ones. The next step will hopefully be to distribute the review process to the community.
JustFab: The Billion Dollar Startup with a Secret Past [1]
Larry Ellison's Cat Island [2]
Or literally dozens (hundreds?) of others. [3]
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278697
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10089747
[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=buzzfeed.com