r/Piracy on Reddit is more of a meme subreddit. I’ve never seen any actual discussion or valuable information as I do on this community. Why is that?
1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don’t request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don’t request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don’t submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
💰 Please help cover server costs.
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.
Im glad we have such a big piracy community, we gotta stick it to the man.
I have learned so much in just this month from lemmy piracy posts. Keep’em coming! Rrrr!
This community also needs to ban random memes.
If it’s not currently a problem then I don’t think we need to ban them. Having to remember a bunch of rules and worry about occasionally tripping one is annoying; and having an occasional stupid meme post isn’t really the end of the world as long as they’re not drowning out useful discussion. If it ever reaches the point where they are then of course things would be different, but that’s not the case right now.
Sometimes it’s better to ban things before they get out of hand than after, tends to be a lot less dramatic at least.
We should just make a PiracyMemes community.
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.
Ironic that the admins bullied r/piracy mods to reopen
Normies eventually ruin everything.
Not wrong, but did we seriously travel back to late 2000’s 4chan? There’s far more apt ways to communicate the concept that communities tend to degenerate to fit the lowest common denominator of their users, and that will only shift lower as the userbase grows. Any community will be better quality when the majority of its userbase consists of people deeply invested in the topic.
I’ve found that talking like a reasonable adult rather than relying on NEET/internet denizen slang as shorthand tends to help “hot takes” like this be taken more seriously. It also gives more for others to respond to, in regards to adding anything useful to a conversation/comment chain.
Why use lot word when few word do trick?
All the normies downvoted you
I’m enough of an oldf*g that I’m beyond dank, I’m positively crepuscular. Absolutely NORMIES GET OUT REEEEEEE
That said his take really adds nothing to the conversation, especially compared to other commenters expressing the same thing more eloquently desu
It’s the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.
It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.
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.
This might be a problem for shititjustworks. Where lemmyworld has been expanding their mod team and admins, I haven’t seen posts of shititjustworks doing the same. They seem to be struggling with a subset of exploding-heads users posting horrid things and signing up under new accounts when banned, which doesn’t help.
Also, some might suggest bots, and scripts to auto-remove comments and posts to help for moderation. While this might indeed help, there still needs increase in mods eventually if the userbase grows, but maybe less more than it is needed without any scripts.
Think like this: You need to go from point A to point B. You can do it walking, you can use a bicycle, or you can use a car. All of them needs energy (moderators). Some more than others. If you use tools, you need less, but still you need to use it. And if the distance of these two points become bigger, you need more energy, but of course a car helps tremendously, but still you need to focus on the car and use energy.
So a 1 person moderators with all the tools, bots and filters won’t help much if there is an user-base of millions in the community.
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
I always thought the “Take everything as truth or in good faith” was more about the fact that it’s really difficult to truly figure out if something is fake or not and if you start enabling people to declare stories fake, then you risk ostracizing the OP and people that are thinking of posting similar stories.
As well as it helps prevent needless discussion over the text. It just seemed more sensible to make the decision to wash your hands of it and not think too deeply about it than let the comments go wild arguing with each other over the story.
Yeah but then you wind up with stories where the antagonist is comically evil; a mustache twirling bad guy right out of vaudeville. And don’t forget, “everybody clapped”
Well yeah, but I’ve never been bothered by that. I just tab away.
I could never wrap my head around the concept of “karma farming”
If it wasn’t being used as a means for ego, there is monetary motivation. During the migration off reddit there was some discussion in the fediverse about how/where you could sell your reddit account and for how much depending on the karma.
Why are legitimate accounts valuable? Basically, if you’re a company and you want to shill your products without spending money on ads, you can do “native marketing”. It’s basically spreading word about your product through normal comments and posts on social media, attpting to blend in with natural discussion and legitimate product reccomendations by real people. There’s also some studies that indicate that people are more receptive to this sort of thing than more traditional marketing.
It’s easier to masquerade as a real person when you can buy an account in good standing that has “real person” posting habits from before it was sold to you.
Like most subreddits it devolved over time, but hailcorporate used to be pretty good at calling out this sort of stealth marketing, like when posts would make it to the top of the picture based subs with product placement in the background. Like “I thought I could trust my new puppy home alone finally, but I came home to this” picture of a torn up couch, but the coffee table has fast food bags on it placed with the logo clearly visible. Sometimes they even reported groups of shill accounts by documenting coordinated changes in posting behavior across groups of accounts.
Yeah! And it helps that there is no karma here. We just give a hoot about preservation and sharing. :)
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
Joke’s on them, my instance doesn’t have a downvote button, downvotes don’t affect me in the slightest :P
That’s beehaw right <.< Quick curiosity, does that extend to other instances for you? Or can you still downvote as long as it’s not on a community within your own instance? I didn’t make my own account there, but I read the explanation for no downvoting and I felt like it made a lot of sense.
No, it’s lemmy.blahaj.zone. :)
Can’t downvote, and downvotes don’t affect my experience in any way. Top is sorted by raw upvotes. If someone downvotes, it’s the same as if they didn’t vote at all to me.
I love it!
Ah yeah, I guess I could have checked the rest of your profile name lol. That’s very cool! It’s really making me think more about which instance I wanna stick with as a primary.
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
I don’t think it’s for what you don’t “like” but whether it was correct or relevant to the topic. So upvotes push important and relevant info forward. But I could be wrong.
I know what you’re saying, but I feel like it does both tbh
Don’t you think things might become muddled if it serves both purposes? How often do you see people on Reddit admitting they were wrong or compromising versus arguing and when one side concedes just downvoting the other persons comments?
On a sidenote one thing that bugged me about Reddit was people making a comment that agreed with another comment but added nothing but still getting up votes because people agree with it. For example “This” with nothing else.
Think a large part of it is context driven and what kind of community it is. I know in more serious threads, more helpful information was usually upvoted. But I get you, Reddit (the default subreddits especially) got too big for its own good and became the muddied groupthink mess it is today, and I definitely agree that those kinds of comments add nothing to a discussion. I suppose one kind of solution here would be to implement the boosting system like they have at kbin and have that as some “helpful/insightful” button, but I don’t think people in general would agree to one standard just like that. They’re more likely going to keep doing what they’re used to, and that’s the voting system. Not sure how to really tackle the problem myself 😅
This
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”.
I don’t think it’s for what you don’t “like” but whether it was correct or relevant to the topic. So upvotes push important and relevant info forward. But I could be wrong.
you’re right according to official reddiquette. the intended use of the downvote button is to de-emphasize irrelevant content and content that otherwise doesn’t contribute to the conversation
i have seen it argued that its intended use use doesn’t matter versus how the majority of people actively use it, similar to language and symbols. usage evolves with time, so meaning evolves with it. personally i prefer the intended usage but i can see where ppl who make this argument are coming from.
the lemmy instance i joined doesn’t have a downvote button at all!
edit: here’s the official reddiquette archived on the wayback machine
Your average reddit user stopped reading at the words “take a moment”. Sad, but true.
tbh, i’d be surprised if most people ever even bothered to even open the reddiquette or terms of service or anything else. i’m not trying to put anyone down or be condescending – i didn’t read any of this when signing up either! i only knew about it because i read discussions about how votes should be used on reddit lol
it’s true, most people are lazy and don’t read and intuitively assume the downvote button is a dislike button. it’s unfortunate, but i don’t know if anything can reasonably be done about stuff like that because i don’t think it’s going to change that people don’t read agreements or rules or guidelines before using a platform or program or service.
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.
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.
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.
That’s my strategy too, but it seems like people just can’t help themselves from dropping some political comment in non political discussions. It’s so tiresome.
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.
It sure does, that’s one of the nicest things.
You might be right about the cycle but there is certainly value to keeping a community small IMO. That chase for higher and higher numbers gets old and evidently has an inverse correlation to post quality.
I think it’s less about keeping the community small and more about not incentivizing karma or whatever scoring equivalent exists.
I hope Lemmy doesn’t put in karma-like points here. Some people make a shit post to farm that karma.
But dopamine addict monkey brain love number go up!
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.
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!
As a corporate entity Reddit had much more liability to worry about and more to lose.
Part of the appeal of the fediverse is that any of us anywhere can run an instance with different stakes, applicable laws, etc.
Without having to worry about profit, conversations can flourish.
Because I don’t feel spied here. Here I feel safe man
I’m watching you
and I am watching you!
I like that you’re watching me
But who is watching the watchers?
The watcher watcher is watching the watchers
The clockmakers
Duncan McLeod
They have a mirror within eyeshot so they can watch themselves. The loop is closed.
Worth noting that what you upvote/downvote is “publicly available” to see on the fediverse if anyone does start to automate moderation actions. Like on reddit where you could get banned from multiple subs for posting on a different one.
That’s interesting - is it only mods who can see that or is there a publicly viewable way ? If mods only is it mods of any federated server or just your “home” instance ?
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.
Number of users and popularity. Plus not being able to seriously discuss it on reddit due to them potentially banning the sub.
I’m excited for Lemmy and other federated communities, because it allows places to stay smaller while still sharing posts and comments. That should help stop the effect of a single community getting super high traffic. Plus there is no karma/score so there’s less incentive to spam low effort posts.
I think a lot of it stemmed from the sub always living in fear of being closed/banned by Reddit’s admins.
deleted by creator
I would add that in addition to this, the community could spool up another instance in a game of cat an mouse should anyone ever TRY to stop it. As the saying goes: piracy is like hydra, you cut one head off and two grow back.
Hail Hydra
Hail Hydrate?
Where my lemmy hydrohomies at?
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.
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.