this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2021

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Piracy

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Welcome to /c/piracy

No netflix or streaming services landlubbers allowed, this is pirates territory.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

I'm the top mod of /r/piracy in reddit. Can I get a mod position? (www.reddit.com)

submitted 2 years ago by db0@lemmy.ml to c/piracy@lemmy.ml

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Hey y'all, In the past I had arranged that /f/piracy in raddle.me would be the fallback forum for /r/piracy, but I recently noticed that raddle.me has disabled new user registrations and that would be a problem in case we need it.

And with reddit about to go public, it might be needed.

Instead of trying to spin up my own lemmy instance, I was thinking if I could get a mod position in this forum and specify it as the official /r/piracy fallback instead.

Feel free to PM me in reddit for verification.

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

To echo some of the thoughts of those below:

This was one of the first communities I made here on lemmy, because I was disappointed in /r/piracy for two reasons:

Removals of piracy links, content, guides, etc.

I realize most of that is unavoidable self-policing, because reddit is a US-based company that must adhere to the US's draconian copyright and IP laws. Lemmy is self-hostable, and doesn't have that problem. Outside of illegal or harmful content, there's no reason for us to remove anything piracy-related. So a lot of those bans and removals are probably not the mod's fault, its work reddit requires you to do to have a presence there.

A "soft" / "pickme" approach to piracy.

A lot of people on /r/piracy either support or half-support centralized services like netflix and spotify. Copy-leftists like myself believe these services are really harmful to keeping data alive and shared. People that either never torrented in the first place, or that have moved off torrenting, make one less seeder, or adder of new content. I can't even find some newer documentaries and music on torrents, because netflix and spotify have successfully captured and privatized that data, and new people no longer have a pro-sharing mentality: Netflix lets them have an "I got mine" mentality.

So counter to /r/piracy, !piracy@lemmy.ml has a strict anti-centralized services rule.

At the same time, I welcome genuine pro-piracy mods from reddit who would like to get started over here, and do a better job building and growing this community more than I ever could. If you sticky a post or put something in the sidebar of /r/piracy having this as a backup, I'll mod you. Or you could just make another piracy community here, something like /c/piracynews and have control over that community.

cc @Farmer_Heck@lemmygrad.ml

[–] db0@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately, point A is unavoidable. We already got contacted by the reddit admins with an almost impossible demand (police not only new stuff, but also historical stuff) so we had to take a very draconian approach to avoid takedown.

While I agree with point B myself, being a staunch proponent of copylefts, it doesn't make sense to censor people for not being as radical as we area. It's by rubbing noses with us that they will change their tune.

To be clear, I am generally not against being more explicit anti-centralized, but while growing /r/piracy, it didn't make sense.

At the same time, I welcome genuine pro-piracy mods from reddit who would like to get started over here, and do a better job building and growing this community more than I ever could. If you sticky a post or put something in the sidebar of /r/piracy having this as a backup, I’ll mod you.

Done. Check the the sidebar in https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/

The main objective here is to be able to redirect people over and make sure we don't splinter the community if and when reddit takes action against /r/piracy.

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

At this point you should let Reddit ban /r/piracy. Less page views for them the better.

[–] Whom@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Losing /r/piracy would be a real shame. I haven't had a reddit account in years, but I still visit occasionally because the megathread and other things are such great resources (especially when I need to grab stream links for friends too scared to torrent). It's important for outreach, whether we like it or not.

[–] xvf@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Why do you feel the need to be mod?🤔

You can just be a user just like everyone else.

[–] db0@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If I am going to redirect all the sizable community of reddit /r/piracy to a safe haven, I feel I have a responsibility to make sure that the destination is well run. The only way I can do that is to be a mod.

[–] DPUGT2@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Supposing that somehow "well run" means anything that anyone else agrees with, aren't you sort of the poster child of "not well run"? During your tenure at reddit, for instance, r/piracy became almost entirely useless. Years of prime advice was nuked when you erased everything but the last 6 months of history. Rules, and also secret rules, were enacted that make it impossible to discuss anything important. Contributors were banned form the subreddit having already demonstrated their worth.

As it is now, if the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with the Spanish priests who burned the Mayan codices to run a piracy internet forum, they still wouldn't do as shitty a job as r/piracy does. If you had any sort of integrity at all, wouldn't you have shut down the forum years ago?

[–] db0@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Years of prime advice was nuked when you erased everything but the last 6 months of history.

You realize the alternative was to lose the subreddit to the reddit admins, yes?

[–] DPUGT2@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

So you destroyed the village in order to save it? You did lose the subreddit anyway. Nothing could ever be discussed. Everyone self-censored even if you didn't force the issue on them.

The admins did it. But instead of them doing it despite your efforts, you cooperated. Hell, even that might be forgivable if afterward you'd realized the mistake you made and owned up to it. Instead, you're here defending it.

What great lessons have you learned, that the same or similar wouldn't be repeated here? I mean, another person might have spent years struggling with and straining their brain to figure out how to make a forum that assholes like the reddit admins can't nuke. No, your best is apparently waiting for someone else to come up with a possible solution, and then just migrating over to it until the copyright trolls catch up and start lobbing legal thermonukes in this direction. Then I guess you'll cooperate again, and wait for yet another forum to be created somewhere else, only to repeat the pattern.

[+] TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml -2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] DPUGT2@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 years ago

Shutting down the entire subreddit would have been worse

How? If shut down, then there would be no forum. And the other option, there was the appearance of a forum, where nothing of substance about the topic it was founded upon could be discussed.

This wasn't about people posting torrent links (or not just that). They were nuking all sorts of shit. Discussions of when torrents might become available in the future, technical details on how anything worked, release names. You name it, anything of interest was gone (and that's only from that point going forward, literally everything going backwards was scrubbed and scrubbed hard).

When a large social media platform continues to exist, even if it's bad, even if it's unusable... it sucks the oxygen out of the room. Often making it impossible for anything else to take its place, even if that substitute would fix those problems. By keeping that forum around, it starved out other possible venues for years.

It wasn't the right call. It just happened to be the only call where he got to continue to "be in charge". Which is the thing he's most concerned about here, with this post.

and the old posts were archived, so the post link removal is not an issue.

That's great for historiants in the 26th century, they have access to all of those posts. For the vast majority of human beings alive today, they are effectively gone. They cannot be found without extraordinary, heroic efforts. Which no one will bother to do, because if they knew what it was they were looking for exactly, there'd be no reason to search in the first place.

"Don't worry that he burned down the public library, some millionaire book collector who lives in Europe somewhere has private copies of all the rare editions!"

The talk of an exodus being possible in the first place here, is because it was not shut down back then.

That exodus happened way back then. Just no one noticed because they had a heavily-censored forum with enough activity that it looked like something was going on.