Why Lemmy's Piracy Community Outshines r/Piracy?
Why Lemmy's Piracy Community Outshines r/Piracy?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 a lot of it stemmed from the sub always living in fear of being closed/banned by Reddit's admins.
Correct, also because of copyright trolls and DMCA and how Reddit works in tangent with those companies closely.
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
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
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 🙃
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.
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 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.
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.
Im glad we have such a big piracy community, we gotta stick it to the man.
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 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.
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 ?
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
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 it's because only the best pirates came over to lemmy.
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 have learned so much in just this month from lemmy piracy posts. Keep'em coming! Rrrr!