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. :)
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.
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 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’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.
Joke’s on them, my instance doesn’t have a downvote button, downvotes don’t affect me in the slightest :P
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
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”
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.
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.
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 hope Lemmy doesn’t put in karma-like points here. Some people make a shit post to farm that karma.
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.
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.
