12 ms·

Piracy is deleting almost ten years of history to avoid ban

163 points by okket 8y ago

mindslight 8y ago
This is a small price to pay for the censorship that has successfully defeated the scourges of white nationalism, bigotry, and general ignorance. Oh, censorship hasn't actually achieved those things, you say? Then why the fuck are we tolerating its coordinated resurgence?! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. The same old authoritarian bullshit that jumpstarted reddit can now end it. It is once again time to move on to new pastures, ideally ones that can't just flip the censorship switch in the future.
- anonymouswacker 8y ago
  It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests, but these interests started to spread into the dark elements of hate speech, child pornography, etc. When profitability comes into question, as any company wants to strive for, it has to appease. Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Either it has to take responsibility for its users' content, and act as an editor/publisher, or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    The four horsemen have always been on reddit, hence my reference to the AACS key. The only things that have changed is that the payment processors have decided to leverage their business in a play to control speech, and that there is a good contingent of users cheering on the resulting censorship push in a shortsighted fantasy of making people better. The latter is what I take issue with. Sure, it's really just that ignorant pop(ulist) culture has usurped the Internet. And yes that itself was unfortunately inevitable. But it's not Internet culture and there should be more uniform condemnation and outrage from the traditionally marginalized communities who took to the Internet earlier, rather than mental gymnastics justifying how censorship is great when it's deployed against today's undesirables.
    - the_fonz 8y ago
      I think the bigger chilling effects (ie deplatforming of controversial figures) have been consequences of: 1. Depending on advertiser-model corporations for public commons during the analog to digital transition that should be nonprofit, independent and speech tolerant. 2. Fascist culture of safe spaces and coddled individuals enabled by academic faculties and admin who haven't lead by example and explained what civil debate entails: civilized disagreement and honest debate, not banning people and only inviting those we already agree with. 2b. A loss of decency, academic and civic rigor perpetuated by extended infantilism. 3. Cyberdisinhibitionism - combined with the previous, manufactured outrage/drama, out-of-line behavior, quips, ephemeral nonsense and anonymous popularity become the primary motivations for online discussion, rather than extending the physical world.
      - rocqua 8y ago
        Calling safe spaces 'fascist' offhandedly is rather extreme. such a statement should probably be explained or left out. Currently, it just looks hostile for the sake of being hostile.
      - rat87 8y ago
        It's funny you call safe spaces Fascistic while arguing against censorship. A lot of it doesn't have much to do with civilized disagreement and honest debate since many of the people deplatformed are neither interested nor capable of it
  - devoply 8y ago
    ah yes 4chan lite was supposed to turn out completely differently.
    - meko 8y ago
      You mean canv.as?
  - mxfh 8y ago
    "Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," ... "It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests" Huh? None of these platforms got established as primarily long tail platforms. They were meant to be potentially big with lowest common denominators (news, aggregation, social connection in education communities) and grow into niches. Niche are topical forums and topical social networks.
    - Quarrelsome 8y ago
      Facebook was for students, specifically one or two campuses to begin with. YouTube is in the name, it was a video platform for users to start personal channels of tubing themselves and idk wtf twitter was ever supposed to be.
      - dustindiamond 8y ago
        Twitter was started as any easy way to send group texts via SMS, before phones would widely support group texting.
    - wongarsu 8y ago
      Reddit was a link aggregator for the lowest common denominator. But with the introduction of comments and subreddits they stumbled into the role of an aggregator of niche communities and mostly pivoted to fulfill that role better, until fairly recently (with the redesign, community containment and bans etc. in an effort to increase mass appeal)
  - yreg 8y ago
    >or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue hey what do we pay gold for then :(
    - PeterisP 8y ago
      As far as I understand, the gold revenue is not really meaningful compared to advertising, it's something like a few percent of their total revenue.
  - _pmf_ 8y ago
    > Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Funny how that wasn't a problem until the Bad Orange Man won. Surely just a coincidence.
    - seszett 8y ago
      If you're suggesting that Donald Trump has some connection with the bans of controversial subreddits I think you're wrong, since the one big ban of fatpeoplehate, shitniggerssay and a few other controversial subreddits happened in 2015, a full year before Donald Trump's election.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        /r/jailbait and a few related subreddits were closed way back in 2011.
        bloopernova 8y ago
        And while they are less popular, there definitely are still subreddits dedicated to "legal aged women who look like very young teenagers wink wink" content, with rules that are entirely designed to argue the letter of the law so they don't get banned.
      - zcid 8y ago
        But political subreddits didn't start seeing bans until 2016. Around the same time, the face of the major news subreddits drastically changed as well. I don't know if it was a result of the election, but the timing does seem to consider further consideration of motives.
        ehrman 8y ago
        I think this is the result of anti-propaganda efforts after the election. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_re...
      - 8y ago
- panarky 8y ago
  Stop signs and police citations are a small price to pay for the traffic control that has eliminated fatal road accidents. Oh, traffic control hasn't actually eliminated every fatality? Then why the fuck are we tolerating stop signs and police citations?
Asooka 8y ago
Good. Piracy must be eradicated if culture is to survive.
- rhn_mk1 8y ago
  Huh? Piracy: permissionless copying, extending, including, remixing, transforming, retelling, inspiring; is culture.
- CableGorilla 8y ago
  Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
  - tomohawk 8y ago
    Since this statement is an absolute truth claim, perhaps the one making it is a sith?
  - Maken 8y ago
    This comment will eventually cause the deletion of this entire thread. Congratulations.
- s_dev 8y ago
  >Piracy: the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work. Doesn't seem inherently bad to me. It would be bad if it were for your own commerical benefit but if done for the preservation of culture for example it could be justified. If we couldn't copy CD's some music or video games might be lost forever -- even though copying is forbidden by the licence.
- scoot_718 8y ago
  Copyright needs to be eradicated if culture is to survive.
- whywhywhywhy 8y ago
  People passionate about something are much more responsible than actual legal rights holders. Rights holders only do the absolute minimum to preserve the culture they own, countless movies available in the commercial space are the worst quality versions of those movies and people passionate about those movies will go as far as tracking down multiple versions to take the picture quality of one, cut scenes from another, the sound from another and the subtitles from a fourth to make definitive best image, best sound, no cuts version and they do all that for free.
klntsky 8y ago
/r/Piracy owners deserve it. They should've considered such a possibility before allowing their community to grow on a platform they do not control. So they are not "victims", just a bit inconsiderate. And there is no reason to blame reddit, or anyone, for the deletion. They are not obliged to provide their service to anyone.
- laurent123456 8y ago
  On the other hand, it's thanks to communities like this one and others that Reddit got where it is today. So not unreasonable to blame them when they change their mind in the name of Ads.
  - klntsky 8y ago
    Nope. These communities' owners and participants were basically just doing free work by producing content. But they didn't sign a contract or anything. > So not unreasonable to blame them when they change their mind in the name of Ads. That change of mind was a part of their business model. Why blaming people for making legal businesses? The problem is in people who trust "free" services and expect the terms to remain the same forever.
- emilfihlman 8y ago
  Linking to content is not piracy.
  - dvdkon 8y ago
    /r/piracy had a strict policy of not linking to pirate content, even. They really tried to stay on Reddit's good side.
- dvdkon 8y ago
  I could create a site promising to host all files forever and after years of operation delete everything. It would certainly be within my rights, but you'd have every reason to hate me. Having a legal right to do something doesn't mean it is a good (and compassionate) idea.
schrectacular 8y ago
It seems like rights holders have realized that carpet bombing is a cheap and "effective" strategy. There are reports (https://youtu.be/JwG0bQ7WC3c https://youtu.be/JwG0bQ7WC3c) of music copyright holders reporting the use of even a single chord in YouTube videos. This strategy appears to be having a chilling effect across multiple platforms. Copyright claims are super easy to make at scale, but the platforms themselves cannot investigate at scale, meaning the small guy suffers. Yes, redditers who are truly infringing should have their posts removed, but the result of trigger-happy, likely bot controled complaints is having an effect on legal speech.
- Tsubasachan 8y ago
  One of my favourite torrent sites decided to go private because of DMCA takedown requests. That probably wouldn't work for Reddit. But it just illustrates that the pirate ship will keep on sailing even if you can't see it.
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    If you can't see it, it will also be harder for casual pirates to find. It's basically impossible to stop piracy, but it can be made more difficult, and that could have a significant impact.
- Traster 8y ago
  This seems like a direct knock on effect of the ridiculous asymmetry in legal liability. Due to the draconian way the DMCA works all the content platforms have their own informal process. The informal process involves no liability for a false claim so as a result you get this mass claiming. Here's a fun point though - the DMCA is draconian partly because platforms like Youtube enabled mass piracy in order to capture market share when they were small. The costs of Youtube's illegal activity early on is now being passed on to their users today.
  - debacle 8y ago
    The DMCA is not draconian, and in fact is a pretty even handed law. Its implementation by the various platforms is what's draconian - a mostly automated system that defers to rights holders without any sort of real appeals process.
dspillett 8y ago
If people want the data after this purge is complete, it might be available in resoruces such as those linked from https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6lqbsd/downloading_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6lqbsd/downloadin... Though you may need to do some work to extract what you want from the mass of data, and won't get the latest information.
supernes 8y ago
Can't wait until reddit decides to ban porn as advertiser-unfriendly, à la tumblr. They're heading steadfast in the direction of sanitizing the site until it's nothing but gifs of puppies yawning.
- Bayart 8y ago
  There's something heartwarming about 4chan remaining committed to being absolute cancer.
  - devmop 8y ago
    Even they've gone down that route. 4chan's been split into two domains with the NSFW boards on the original and the SFW boards (or as safe as 4chan ever gets) on the other.
  - wsgeorge 8y ago
    4chan, despite all its vileness, has convinced me of the necessity to maintain as much unrestrained human freedom in (at least) some quarters of the Internet as is possible. Such freedom seems so essential to Internet culture that, in my opinion, it must be protected.
    - panarky 8y ago
      > 4chan, despite all its vileness, has convinced me of the necessity to maintain as much unrestrained human freedom ... Can you provide an example of something valuable you found on 4chan/8chan that could not be found on a site with less "vileness"?
      - fxbl0i 8y ago
        Political arguments that differ from the mainstream and that could only happen on a platform which is both anonymous and has a hands off approach to moderation and monetisation.
        8y ago
m-p-3 8y ago
I have an IPFS archive available here, feel free to pin it to your node. https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7QJEsWu4m/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7Q...
- Majestic121 8y ago
  It seems that links all point to the original website, not an IPFS copy. As a result, you'd still lose a lot of content, for example all the images stored in imgur. Is there a way to solve this ?
  - m-p-3 8y ago
    The goal of the archive was to keep anything from inside reddit (submission links, comments) available with the smallest footprint possible. (compressed 80MB, decompressed 1.2GB) I guess you could run the archive tool with some extra parameters to grab external content, but it will substantially increase the archive size.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
How is Reddit’s crackdown on piracy-mentioning posts going to affect r/Scholar? That’s a subreddit where the guidelines clearly point people to Sci-Hub and Libgen, and if the desired content is not there, people are encouraged to supply that content to those who request it. r/Scholar is very popular in the academic world, especially in countries like India where institutions often lack subscriptions to publication-hosting databases, and I can imagine great disappointment if that subreddit were shut down.
- rahuldottech 8y ago
  Dunno man, but I hope it survives. Even if it is banned, maybe it'll pop up as a different community elsewhere?
  - Aromasin 8y ago
    My Reddit time has dropped to almost 0 with the mass adoption of Discord. Lots of valuable Google Sheets full of resources are pinned in the most niche of Discord servers. It's not an effective swap in many cases, but it's advantages are currently vastly outweighing the disadvantages.
    - mkbkn 8y ago
      I've considered spending more time on Discord than reddit but finding quality Discord servers is hard. How did you find such valuable servers? Could you guide me.
      - abrugsch 8y ago
        mostly from within the communities that you wish to follow... for instance the podcasts and youtube channels surrounding $HOBBY might lead you their own server. then once you're in a couple, and get chatting, people mention other servers, or one of the channels will be dedicated to listing similar or related servers. many will be linked/pinned from subreddits too. what's your interest? I might be able to point you to a few
rel2thr 8y ago
I’m surprised reddit let’s the sports stream subreddits stay up. These are kind of going mainstream and must be a huge thorn in the side of cable companies
- save_ferris 8y ago
  They started cracking down on the soccer stream subs a few months ago, but I'm not sure why they haven't followed suit on the American sports streams.
  - alexcason 8y ago
    RIP r/soccerstreams
  - lightbyte 8y ago
    That massive ban-wave was pushed by entities such as Sky who don't have an interest in American sports streams
  - oligopoly 8y ago
    Yeah, and people just moved elsewhere. All it's going to do is hurt Reddit's bottom line. Let me guess porn is next? Digg is looming
- rhino369 8y ago
  My only guess is that the NFL, NBA, etc. don’t really care. The viewers are still watching the ads.
black_puppydog 8y ago
Some of r/Piracy seems to be willing to play with more p2p solutions. If you're willing to sacrifice archival properties (like the last ten years woth of stuff...) then even an IRC channel might do. Some people are playing with scuttlebutt/ssb, and frankly I don't see why that wouldn't be a good fit, assuming you handle your feed with a bit of care if you want to stay anonymous. Edit: of course, not everyone is happy about this. There is definitely a culture mismatch between most of the (current) ssb community and r/piracy.
kyriakos 8y ago
Not just about piracy but.. This is the usual pattern in online discussion platforms. Start free, advocate for free speech, then figure out you need to make money and you suddenly stop being a rebel and sink down to be the corporate sellout you always preached against. Reddit will eventually be replaced by something else and the cycle continues.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  It's a natural movement of power between older and newer generations. As power transfers, the recipients change strategies from attack to defend.
  - black_puppydog 8y ago
    that makes it sound far more inevitable than it really is.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      It sure looks inevitable.
      - black_puppydog 8y ago
        given that every corporate player gets displaced by another one that operates with the same incentives and structures, and plays by the same rules. as a counterexample: in this case, r/piracy (and reddit more generally) could (in theory, and increasingly in practice) be replaced by p2p tech, which would simply not be controllable, nor have any incentive to appease advertisers. a different example: you could say the same about healthcare providers. a medical startup could displace an established provider, then turn around and push the same rent extraction BS on their customers. Socialized healthcare (while it has its own problems for sure) will not follow the same rules. Read: if something seems sucky yet inevitable, you're probably not questioning enough of your assumptions.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
Pizzaputer 8y ago
At some point, I think content-hosts should counter-sue for time and customers/clients/users lost for erroneous copyright filings. Then the internet can just become one great big lawsuit that happens to have computers attached to it.
systematical 8y ago
Funny yet /r/NHLStreams persists. The internet is a funny place.
- dwild 8y ago
  It's all up to the copyright holder. Some are more active looking over their copyrights, some just care less.
IloveHN84 8y ago
I hope people from internet archive is storing everything. Until no alternative to unique source of streaming with a single account shows up, I 'm not going to pay for every streaming service
Xelbair 8y ago
I wonder why regulations target content sharing platforms, not the content itself. or the ads companies.

163 points by okket 8y ago

This is a small price to pay for the censorship that has successfully defeated the scourges of white nationalism, bigotry, and general ignorance. Oh, censorship hasn't actually achieved those things, you say? Then why the fuck are we tolerating its coordinated resurgence?! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. The same old authoritarian bullshit that jumpstarted reddit can now end it. It is once again time to move on to new pastures, ideally ones that can't just flip the censorship switch in the future.

anonymouswacker 8y ago
It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests, but these interests started to spread into the dark elements of hate speech, child pornography, etc. When profitability comes into question, as any company wants to strive for, it has to appease. Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Either it has to take responsibility for its users' content, and act as an editor/publisher, or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue.
- mindslight 8y ago
  The four horsemen have always been on reddit, hence my reference to the AACS key. The only things that have changed is that the payment processors have decided to leverage their business in a play to control speech, and that there is a good contingent of users cheering on the resulting censorship push in a shortsighted fantasy of making people better. The latter is what I take issue with. Sure, it's really just that ignorant pop(ulist) culture has usurped the Internet. And yes that itself was unfortunately inevitable. But it's not Internet culture and there should be more uniform condemnation and outrage from the traditionally marginalized communities who took to the Internet earlier, rather than mental gymnastics justifying how censorship is great when it's deployed against today's undesirables.
  - the_fonz 8y ago
    I think the bigger chilling effects (ie deplatforming of controversial figures) have been consequences of: 1. Depending on advertiser-model corporations for public commons during the analog to digital transition that should be nonprofit, independent and speech tolerant. 2. Fascist culture of safe spaces and coddled individuals enabled by academic faculties and admin who haven't lead by example and explained what civil debate entails: civilized disagreement and honest debate, not banning people and only inviting those we already agree with. 2b. A loss of decency, academic and civic rigor perpetuated by extended infantilism. 3. Cyberdisinhibitionism - combined with the previous, manufactured outrage/drama, out-of-line behavior, quips, ephemeral nonsense and anonymous popularity become the primary motivations for online discussion, rather than extending the physical world.
    - rocqua 8y ago
      Calling safe spaces 'fascist' offhandedly is rather extreme. such a statement should probably be explained or left out. Currently, it just looks hostile for the sake of being hostile.
    - rat87 8y ago
      It's funny you call safe spaces Fascistic while arguing against censorship. A lot of it doesn't have much to do with civilized disagreement and honest debate since many of the people deplatformed are neither interested nor capable of it
- devoply 8y ago
  ah yes 4chan lite was supposed to turn out completely differently.
  - meko 8y ago
    You mean canv.as?
- mxfh 8y ago
  "Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," ... "It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests" Huh? None of these platforms got established as primarily long tail platforms. They were meant to be potentially big with lowest common denominators (news, aggregation, social connection in education communities) and grow into niches. Niche are topical forums and topical social networks.
  - Quarrelsome 8y ago
    Facebook was for students, specifically one or two campuses to begin with. YouTube is in the name, it was a video platform for users to start personal channels of tubing themselves and idk wtf twitter was ever supposed to be.
    - dustindiamond 8y ago
      Twitter was started as any easy way to send group texts via SMS, before phones would widely support group texting.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    Reddit was a link aggregator for the lowest common denominator. But with the introduction of comments and subreddits they stumbled into the role of an aggregator of niche communities and mostly pivoted to fulfill that role better, until fairly recently (with the redesign, community containment and bans etc. in an effort to increase mass appeal)
- yreg 8y ago
  >or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue hey what do we pay gold for then :(
  - PeterisP 8y ago
    As far as I understand, the gold revenue is not really meaningful compared to advertising, it's something like a few percent of their total revenue.
- _pmf_ 8y ago
  > Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Funny how that wasn't a problem until the Bad Orange Man won. Surely just a coincidence.
  - seszett 8y ago
    If you're suggesting that Donald Trump has some connection with the bans of controversial subreddits I think you're wrong, since the one big ban of fatpeoplehate, shitniggerssay and a few other controversial subreddits happened in 2015, a full year before Donald Trump's election.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      /r/jailbait and a few related subreddits were closed way back in 2011.
      - bloopernova 8y ago
        And while they are less popular, there definitely are still subreddits dedicated to "legal aged women who look like very young teenagers wink wink" content, with rules that are entirely designed to argue the letter of the law so they don't get banned.
    - zcid 8y ago
      But political subreddits didn't start seeing bans until 2016. Around the same time, the face of the major news subreddits drastically changed as well. I don't know if it was a result of the election, but the timing does seem to consider further consideration of motives.
      - ehrman 8y ago
        I think this is the result of anti-propaganda efforts after the election. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_response_to_recent_reports_about_the_integrity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/827zqc/in_re...
    - 8y ago
panarky 8y ago
Stop signs and police citations are a small price to pay for the traffic control that has eliminated fatal road accidents. Oh, traffic control hasn't actually eliminated every fatality? Then why the fuck are we tolerating stop signs and police citations?

Asooka 8y ago

Good. Piracy must be eradicated if culture is to survive.

rhn_mk1 8y ago
Huh? Piracy: permissionless copying, extending, including, remixing, transforming, retelling, inspiring; is culture.
CableGorilla 8y ago
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
- tomohawk 8y ago
  Since this statement is an absolute truth claim, perhaps the one making it is a sith?
- Maken 8y ago
  This comment will eventually cause the deletion of this entire thread. Congratulations.
s_dev 8y ago
>Piracy: the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work. Doesn't seem inherently bad to me. It would be bad if it were for your own commerical benefit but if done for the preservation of culture for example it could be justified. If we couldn't copy CD's some music or video games might be lost forever -- even though copying is forbidden by the licence.
scoot_718 8y ago
Copyright needs to be eradicated if culture is to survive.
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
People passionate about something are much more responsible than actual legal rights holders. Rights holders only do the absolute minimum to preserve the culture they own, countless movies available in the commercial space are the worst quality versions of those movies and people passionate about those movies will go as far as tracking down multiple versions to take the picture quality of one, cut scenes from another, the sound from another and the subtitles from a fourth to make definitive best image, best sound, no cuts version and they do all that for free.

klntsky 8y ago

/r/Piracy owners deserve it. They should've considered such a possibility before allowing their community to grow on a platform they do not control. So they are not "victims", just a bit inconsiderate. And there is no reason to blame reddit, or anyone, for the deletion. They are not obliged to provide their service to anyone.

laurent123456 8y ago
On the other hand, it's thanks to communities like this one and others that Reddit got where it is today. So not unreasonable to blame them when they change their mind in the name of Ads.
- klntsky 8y ago
  Nope. These communities' owners and participants were basically just doing free work by producing content. But they didn't sign a contract or anything. > So not unreasonable to blame them when they change their mind in the name of Ads. That change of mind was a part of their business model. Why blaming people for making legal businesses? The problem is in people who trust "free" services and expect the terms to remain the same forever.
emilfihlman 8y ago
Linking to content is not piracy.
- dvdkon 8y ago
  /r/piracy had a strict policy of not linking to pirate content, even. They really tried to stay on Reddit's good side.
dvdkon 8y ago
I could create a site promising to host all files forever and after years of operation delete everything. It would certainly be within my rights, but you'd have every reason to hate me. Having a legal right to do something doesn't mean it is a good (and compassionate) idea.

schrectacular 8y ago

It seems like rights holders have realized that carpet bombing is a cheap and "effective" strategy. There are reports (https://youtu.be/JwG0bQ7WC3c https://youtu.be/JwG0bQ7WC3c) of music copyright holders reporting the use of even a single chord in YouTube videos. This strategy appears to be having a chilling effect across multiple platforms. Copyright claims are super easy to make at scale, but the platforms themselves cannot investigate at scale, meaning the small guy suffers. Yes, redditers who are truly infringing should have their posts removed, but the result of trigger-happy, likely bot controled complaints is having an effect on legal speech.

Tsubasachan 8y ago
One of my favourite torrent sites decided to go private because of DMCA takedown requests. That probably wouldn't work for Reddit. But it just illustrates that the pirate ship will keep on sailing even if you can't see it.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  If you can't see it, it will also be harder for casual pirates to find. It's basically impossible to stop piracy, but it can be made more difficult, and that could have a significant impact.
Traster 8y ago
This seems like a direct knock on effect of the ridiculous asymmetry in legal liability. Due to the draconian way the DMCA works all the content platforms have their own informal process. The informal process involves no liability for a false claim so as a result you get this mass claiming. Here's a fun point though - the DMCA is draconian partly because platforms like Youtube enabled mass piracy in order to capture market share when they were small. The costs of Youtube's illegal activity early on is now being passed on to their users today.
- debacle 8y ago
  The DMCA is not draconian, and in fact is a pretty even handed law. Its implementation by the various platforms is what's draconian - a mostly automated system that defers to rights holders without any sort of real appeals process.

dspillett 8y ago

If people want the data after this purge is complete, it might be available in resoruces such as those linked from https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6lqbsd/downloading_reddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6lqbsd/downloadin... Though you may need to do some work to extract what you want from the mass of data, and won't get the latest information.

supernes 8y ago

Can't wait until reddit decides to ban porn as advertiser-unfriendly, à la tumblr. They're heading steadfast in the direction of sanitizing the site until it's nothing but gifs of puppies yawning.

Bayart 8y ago
There's something heartwarming about 4chan remaining committed to being absolute cancer.
- devmop 8y ago
  Even they've gone down that route. 4chan's been split into two domains with the NSFW boards on the original and the SFW boards (or as safe as 4chan ever gets) on the other.
- wsgeorge 8y ago
  4chan, despite all its vileness, has convinced me of the necessity to maintain as much unrestrained human freedom in (at least) some quarters of the Internet as is possible. Such freedom seems so essential to Internet culture that, in my opinion, it must be protected.
  - panarky 8y ago
    > 4chan, despite all its vileness, has convinced me of the necessity to maintain as much unrestrained human freedom ... Can you provide an example of something valuable you found on 4chan/8chan that could not be found on a site with less "vileness"?
    - fxbl0i 8y ago
      Political arguments that differ from the mainstream and that could only happen on a platform which is both anonymous and has a hands off approach to moderation and monetisation.
      - 8y ago

m-p-3 8y ago

I have an IPFS archive available here, feel free to pin it to your node. https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7QJEsWu4m/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7Q...

Majestic121 8y ago
It seems that links all point to the original website, not an IPFS copy. As a result, you'd still lose a lot of content, for example all the images stored in imgur. Is there a way to solve this ?
- m-p-3 8y ago
  The goal of the archive was to keep anything from inside reddit (submission links, comments) available with the smallest footprint possible. (compressed 80MB, decompressed 1.2GB) I guess you could run the archive tool with some extra parameters to grab external content, but it will substantially increase the archive size.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

How is Reddit’s crackdown on piracy-mentioning posts going to affect r/Scholar? That’s a subreddit where the guidelines clearly point people to Sci-Hub and Libgen, and if the desired content is not there, people are encouraged to supply that content to those who request it. r/Scholar is very popular in the academic world, especially in countries like India where institutions often lack subscriptions to publication-hosting databases, and I can imagine great disappointment if that subreddit were shut down.

rahuldottech 8y ago
Dunno man, but I hope it survives. Even if it is banned, maybe it'll pop up as a different community elsewhere?
- Aromasin 8y ago
  My Reddit time has dropped to almost 0 with the mass adoption of Discord. Lots of valuable Google Sheets full of resources are pinned in the most niche of Discord servers. It's not an effective swap in many cases, but it's advantages are currently vastly outweighing the disadvantages.
  - mkbkn 8y ago
    I've considered spending more time on Discord than reddit but finding quality Discord servers is hard. How did you find such valuable servers? Could you guide me.
    - abrugsch 8y ago
      mostly from within the communities that you wish to follow... for instance the podcasts and youtube channels surrounding $HOBBY might lead you their own server. then once you're in a couple, and get chatting, people mention other servers, or one of the channels will be dedicated to listing similar or related servers. many will be linked/pinned from subreddits too. what's your interest? I might be able to point you to a few

rel2thr 8y ago

I’m surprised reddit let’s the sports stream subreddits stay up. These are kind of going mainstream and must be a huge thorn in the side of cable companies

save_ferris 8y ago
They started cracking down on the soccer stream subs a few months ago, but I'm not sure why they haven't followed suit on the American sports streams.
- alexcason 8y ago
  RIP r/soccerstreams
- lightbyte 8y ago
  That massive ban-wave was pushed by entities such as Sky who don't have an interest in American sports streams
- oligopoly 8y ago
  Yeah, and people just moved elsewhere. All it's going to do is hurt Reddit's bottom line. Let me guess porn is next? Digg is looming
rhino369 8y ago
My only guess is that the NFL, NBA, etc. don’t really care. The viewers are still watching the ads.

black_puppydog 8y ago

Some of r/Piracy seems to be willing to play with more p2p solutions. If you're willing to sacrifice archival properties (like the last ten years woth of stuff...) then even an IRC channel might do. Some people are playing with scuttlebutt/ssb, and frankly I don't see why that wouldn't be a good fit, assuming you handle your feed with a bit of care if you want to stay anonymous. Edit: of course, not everyone is happy about this. There is definitely a culture mismatch between most of the (current) ssb community and r/piracy.

kyriakos 8y ago

Not just about piracy but.. This is the usual pattern in online discussion platforms. Start free, advocate for free speech, then figure out you need to make money and you suddenly stop being a rebel and sink down to be the corporate sellout you always preached against. Reddit will eventually be replaced by something else and the cycle continues.

lallysingh 8y ago
It's a natural movement of power between older and newer generations. As power transfers, the recipients change strategies from attack to defend.
- black_puppydog 8y ago
  that makes it sound far more inevitable than it really is.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    It sure looks inevitable.
    - black_puppydog 8y ago
      given that every corporate player gets displaced by another one that operates with the same incentives and structures, and plays by the same rules. as a counterexample: in this case, r/piracy (and reddit more generally) could (in theory, and increasingly in practice) be replaced by p2p tech, which would simply not be controllable, nor have any incentive to appease advertisers. a different example: you could say the same about healthcare providers. a medical startup could displace an established provider, then turn around and push the same rent extraction BS on their customers. Socialized healthcare (while it has its own problems for sure) will not follow the same rules. Read: if something seems sucky yet inevitable, you're probably not questioning enough of your assumptions.
SiempreViernes 8y ago

Pizzaputer 8y ago

At some point, I think content-hosts should counter-sue for time and customers/clients/users lost for erroneous copyright filings. Then the internet can just become one great big lawsuit that happens to have computers attached to it.

systematical 8y ago

Funny yet /r/NHLStreams persists. The internet is a funny place.

dwild 8y ago
It's all up to the copyright holder. Some are more active looking over their copyrights, some just care less.

IloveHN84 8y ago

I hope people from internet archive is storing everything. Until no alternative to unique source of streaming with a single account shows up, I 'm not going to pay for every streaming service

Xelbair 8y ago

I wonder why regulations target content sharing platforms, not the content itself. or the ads companies.