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?
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. :)
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’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.
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
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
In regard to voting:
Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you’re downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It sure does, that’s one of the nicest things.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Because all the cool kids came here ;)
Reddit was never fun to start with, also the API garbage is not the first reason that made it shitty. Lemmy is ready to take over.
Are the mods that made the megathread here? That’s what important. Content.
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’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.
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!
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 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 ?
This community also needs to ban random memes.
We should just make a PiracyMemes community.
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 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 [email protected]
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.
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
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.
