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?
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.
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.
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.
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
I think it’s because only the best pirates came over to lemmy.
Because all the cool kids came here ;)
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.
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.
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.
Because I don’t feel spied here. Here I feel safe man
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.
