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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope Lemmy doesn't put in karma-like points here. Some people make a shit post to farm that karma.
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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.
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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.
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Im glad we have such a big piracy community, we gotta stick it to the man.
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.
I think a lot of it stemmed from the sub always living in fear of being closed/banned by Reddit's admins.
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
Because all the cool kids came here ;)
Are the mods that made the megathread here? That's what important. Content.
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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 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.
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.
Because I don't feel spied here. Here I feel safe man
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.
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I think it's because only the best pirates came over to lemmy.
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.
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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