I could be wrong, but I think Reddit’s sitewide rules frown on discussions of piracy. Doesn’t look good to advertisers, I assume.
I only base this on many subreddits having rules against discussing how to find pirated content.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Ironic that the admins bullied r/piracy mods to reopen
We have more freedom here, don't have to worry about stepping on any corporate toes. Also the viewership is a lot smaller and the people that are here are more interested in actual information and discussion. I don't think that will change a huge amount, but as the platform grows we may see more shitposts.
Also it takes a little more effort to deal with the decentralized platform here. It kind of weeds out the user base. I mean I've been astonished by the lack of effort seen in some Reddit posts. For example posting a question that can be answered straight away with a simple search.
The one that gets me is photos of screens instead of screenshots. And not like a crashed 3ds or a blue screen. Like in a game or an app where the screenshot button was right there 🙃
Yeah that's some seriously low effort, can't be bothered to use the screenshot function and deal with a file. Actually my feeling is it comes from ineptitude and low intelligence, but all of it is rooted in laziness.
I won't ever be using social media on anything but my phone, and I dont have file sharing between my phone and other devices. So the best anybody will get from me is a picture of the screen.
I dont have file sharing between my phone and other devices
That's patently false. If your device has internet, and your phone has internet, you have file sharing. Email it to yourself if you're too lazy to set up anything else. It takes like 30 seconds.
I'd argue that anything you could post that isn't worth taking that small bit of extra time isn't worth posting in the first place. If you want your discussion places to stay quality and attract quality content, then you need to put forth a bare minimum bit of effort. Communities already trend towards lower effort as they grow in size, there's no need to accelerate that to save yourself a few seconds.
Beyond that, setting up a file share on your home network isn't that tough if you have any interest in doing it.
You're missing the point. I don't send emails to and from other devices. And I have no interest in setting up file sharing, as I'm keeping my devices separate from one another. I consider my phone radioactive to my other devices for privacy/ legal reasons.
There's still the corporate pressure from the host. I assume most people wouldn't be hosting Lemmy from their home for bandwidth/uptime reasons. Its hard to find a truly bulletproof VPS anymore. And they aren't cheap. With the VPS and storage you could be looking at $60-100 out of pocket.
Mine runs me around $55 a month and I have to rely on daily backups since it could be shut down with enough pressure.
Someone has to pay for this, which I imagine will be a problem eventually. I run mine for my own personal use, then I open the instances up with whatever resources I have left over. But if I was running an instance of 10,000+ users, I wouldn't be able to afford that.
There should be an amount of privacy in running a VPS, I mean if your VPS is examining content on your server, time to find a new VPS. They could possibly get complaints about content. They have policies you have to sign off on to contract their services. At least it's a world away from using a site like Reddit where they own your content flat out.
I think a lot of it stemmed from the sub always living in fear of being closed/banned by Reddit's admins.
Because the people who tend to care the most about stuff like what Reddit is doing or about having a long-term community moved here; whereas the people who just wanted a quick and easy way to learn how to download warez stayed behind.
I don't even mean that in a critical way (a lot of us started out like them, and there's a limit to the number of things people can care about anyway) but that's more-or-less what it is. The people who came here are the ones who care more about piracy in-and-of itself and who often have ideological or philosophical reasons to support it; and they tend to be the ones who make the most interesting posts.
It's the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.
- Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
- Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
- New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
- Community becomes "popular" enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
- New users flood in
- Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
- Community now sucks.
It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.
Yeah! And it helps that there is no karma here. We just give a hoot about preservation and sharing. :)
I hope Lemmy never adds karma, or an aggregate score, or anything like that. The up/down votes on posts and comments are good enough.
I never understood the karma thing... guess I'm old school - post to help others where you can and let that be the "karma" you are known for.
Some third party apps add up the score and I hate it. Hoping they all add a setting to hide it.
I don’t mind a score, I’m just so happy there’s no fucking awards here. Those were such a plague, and I was so happy Apollo let me turn them off.
Even though it's meaningless I have seen some people in different communities voting down comments and posts they don't agree with like on Reddit which is unfortunate.
For the piracy community I hope it doesn't just turn into passive aggressive comments directing people to the megathread all the time.
I like helping people dig for obscure stuff
I haven’t downvoted a single thing since joining here. I feel like all I did on Reddit was downvote, there was just a deluge of irritating nothing-comments and posts there. There’s such better discussion here. I’ve already discovered some awesome stuff (like movie-web.app, holy shit) and had some great advice from nice folks about where to go for information on stuff I wanna do.
I hate to say it, but I think the relative inaccessibility of Lemmy makes the community wholly better. Reddit’s decline really began when any cunt with shit views could easily download their app, make an account in two seconds, and spew hate all over. Before that, it was just nerds like me who sat at their computer all day to chat.
I hate to say it, but I think the relative inaccessibility of Lemmy makes the community wholly better. Reddit’s decline really began when any cunt with shit views could easily download their app, make an account in two seconds, and spew hate all over. Before that, it was just nerds like me who at their computer all day to chat.
Unfortunately I feel like that hate and those shitty views are going to spread here soon. I've already seen some people unnecessarily gate keeping over niche topics which is one thing but there's also hateful communities. I can block them but another always seems to spring up.
Sooo using the downvoted button for its intended use? I’ll never understand why people get mad when they use the dislike button for stuff they dislike lol
Original function and concept was to use the downvote exclusively as a spam filter. There's a reason those "I only work 5 hours a week and make 6 figures" posts you see on Instagram never happened on Reddit. They all got buried and hidden at the bottom
If you go to a subreddit without custom css on old.reddit and hover over the downvote button you'll be told to only use it for things that "don't add to the discussion".
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I’ll say I really only see downvoted for hugely unpopular or untrue opinions relating to the API stuff that happened over at reddit. Other than that everything mostly seems positive. I have stayed off political communities for the most part so far though.
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Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
That's where the mods kick in. That's why Askhistorians are awesome and some other subs are not.
Subs die or prevail with the mods at hand. If the users grow, but the mods do not, and it becomes too much for the mods to handle, it will fall. It's easy logic.
The problem isn't the quantity, the problem is moderation in regards to the quantity of the userbase.
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A lot of reddit subs push the shit too. Look at any text-based story subreddit. They all inevitably get a "don't question the facts of the story" rule, which then invites charlatans to start lying.
TalesFromTechSupport and IDontWorkHereLady are probably the two best examples. They went from "I was asked to fix a guy's computer and he was using the CD tray as a cup holder" or "A woman came up to me at target and asked where the corn was and I said I dont work here and she got embarassed" to just utter made up farces and bullshit
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Man I remember watching this happen in realtime to r/AbruptChaos. There were two simple rules 1.the video must start out calm 2. there must be an abrupt moment where multiple things start happening at once. It slowly went from every post being great, to more than 90% of them being chaos the entire video or only having one bizarre event. Idk if it was moderation getting loose or karma-farming or both but hopefully its a while before that starts happening here.
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Im glad we have such a big piracy community, we gotta stick it to the man.
Reddit’s algorithm has slowly deprioritized text-based content over time. I moderate a large discussion sub and our view counts have slowly declined over the past ten years, with the biggest drop happening when the redesign released. Discussion did happen on /r/piracy, but you had to go to the subreddit and sort by new.
We couldn't talk about real digital piracy anymore after seeing so many subs that were acceptable early in Reddit's lifespan get taken down, some deserved, some not.
Having our own server based sub is extremely beneficial and this particular community was lucky that this event occurred. If anyone would like to talk about PC Gaming in a piracy friendly environment, checkout !pcgaming@lemmy.fmhy.ml
Communities rise or fall with the people in them, especially those who contribute and less those who lurk.
Piracy communities are typically made up of people who are used to being shattered to rebuild elsewhere, so it makes sense that this would be one of those who have less trouble moving.
I think it's because only the best pirates came over to lemmy.
Probably because Reddit never really liked "non-adversing friendly" subs. Reddit tolerated them, because it did drive users to the platform. However, there was a fine line between "acceptable piracy" talk vs the ban hammer.
On Lemmy, we have admins who aren't fixated on "the users are the product" and advertisers... So, we can let our guard down and have meaningful discussions.
Welcome to the fediverse!
Because piracy isn’t legal. For anything that can run afoul of the law, or bad publicity, or advertisers’ preferences, Reddit admins have to keep the content on a tight leash. Lemmy doesn’t have advertisers to worry about as it’s supported directly by users, and not being a for-profit company makes it somewhat harder for the law to come down on it (and if they do, the community can easily move). Really, it’s a fundamental advantage of federation.
I think the early days of /r/piracy was pretty good. I learned a lot from it and found many guides and how to. But then it got popular and everyone started flooding in and asked every single little thing instead of reading the wiki and quality went bad.
I think it won't get to that on Lemmy because those who don't read the wiki won't read to understand the fediverse.
I've seen the same issue with many many piracy communities. They start of great with lots of helpful information. But the more they grow the more diluted they become, and also have to worry about legal action after a time so they have to start enforcing rules to protect them selves. Such as not providing links.
reddit was always heavily moderated for real piracy discussion, I believe
By necessity, so that Reddit wouldn't have been obliged to intervene and close the community.
I considered the r/Piracy sub a 'gateway' - it didn't overtly provide pirated content, but it made the pirated content safer and more accessible for people who weren't already familiar with it, or updated us on news for platforms going down or changing hosts. It made piracy accessible.
Of course accessibility means bringing in low-effort users, lurkers, and those who make choices out of comfort/convenience over principle, but it still provided a service.
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