4 ms·

What's the motive for someone going through the effort of faking a good enough take-down notice? There's no immediate financial gain. I doubt there's a reddit

by desine 5y ago

What's the motive for someone going through the effort of faking a good enough take-down notice? There's no immediate financial gain. I doubt there's a reddit bot competitor that somehow needs the extra market share, whatever market it would be. This smells like reddit admins walking back after a lawyer on the staff got too feisty, but the original takedown notice PDF cites Huffman as approving it. Not that I support his recent steering of the business, but it names names. And it doesn't look to be the caliber of writing I would expect from a top 500 visited website's company's legal team This whole thing is fishy as heck. I've mostly stopped caring about that site, since it's become an astro-turfing testbed, but my latent fondness of the good ole days has got me curious about this.

numlock86 5y ago
> What's the motive for someone going through the effort of faking a good enough take-down notice? I doubt it takes that much effort. If I recall correctly the whole idea originated from some 4ch spin-off a couple of weeks ago. Someone probably just picked it up and simply did it, because ... well, "reddit is cancer".
- desine 5y ago
  Hm, fair enough point. I guess my time posting mediocre comments on HN is more valuable to me than inane internet campaigns. But I was also part of a campaign to fake Christopher Walken's presidential bid, so who am I to judge.
- Arrath 5y ago
  Trolls gonna troll, unfortunately.
DocTomoe 5y ago
One of the likely motives: Taking out a free competing system so your own, paid/"ad-supported"/"spyware-supported" SaaS service for downloading videos gets more exposure. It's astonishing how many scam sites operate with the "download a video from anywhere after installing my 'downloader app'" premise. That being said, I do think reddit admins backpedaling on something that blew up in their faces to be a much more likely explanation.
- stordoff 5y ago
  > That being said, I do think reddit admins backpedaling on something that blew up in their faces to be a much more likely explanation. Given the linked takedown notice, I'd be surprised. I can't imagine phrases like "If you failed to pay the compensation will face strict verdict from USA Jurist section." and "Then, We hardly advised to takedown the mentioned services also." would be in an official request from Reddit (claiming "1 Million American Dollars" also sounds a little odd).
  - biofox 5y ago
    The last sentence you quote makes it sound like it was sent by Virtucon Industries.
hn8788 5y ago
Not everything needs a financial motive, sometimes people are just assholes with too much time on their hands. For example, the Titanfall games have been made pretty much unplayable because someone got mad at the company for not giving the games enough attention, so they've been DDoS'ing the servers for a long time. https://twitter.com/alphaINTEL/status/1414551059528306688 https://twitter.com/alphaINTEL/status/1414551059528306688
aasasd 5y ago
I could vaguely imagine someone wanting to snag the domain from the original dev for fifty bucks and spin up a site to ‘save reddit videos... if you give us your phone number’.

by desine 5y ago

numlock86 5y ago

> What's the motive for someone going through the effort of faking a good enough take-down notice? I doubt it takes that much effort. If I recall correctly the whole idea originated from some 4ch spin-off a couple of weeks ago. Someone probably just picked it up and simply did it, because ... well, "reddit is cancer".

desine 5y ago
Hm, fair enough point. I guess my time posting mediocre comments on HN is more valuable to me than inane internet campaigns. But I was also part of a campaign to fake Christopher Walken's presidential bid, so who am I to judge.
Arrath 5y ago
Trolls gonna troll, unfortunately.

DocTomoe 5y ago

One of the likely motives: Taking out a free competing system so your own, paid/"ad-supported"/"spyware-supported" SaaS service for downloading videos gets more exposure. It's astonishing how many scam sites operate with the "download a video from anywhere after installing my 'downloader app'" premise. That being said, I do think reddit admins backpedaling on something that blew up in their faces to be a much more likely explanation.

stordoff 5y ago
> That being said, I do think reddit admins backpedaling on something that blew up in their faces to be a much more likely explanation. Given the linked takedown notice, I'd be surprised. I can't imagine phrases like "If you failed to pay the compensation will face strict verdict from USA Jurist section." and "Then, We hardly advised to takedown the mentioned services also." would be in an official request from Reddit (claiming "1 Million American Dollars" also sounds a little odd).
- biofox 5y ago
  The last sentence you quote makes it sound like it was sent by Virtucon Industries.

hn8788 5y ago

Not everything needs a financial motive, sometimes people are just assholes with too much time on their hands. For example, the Titanfall games have been made pretty much unplayable because someone got mad at the company for not giving the games enough attention, so they've been DDoS'ing the servers for a long time. https://twitter.com/alphaINTEL/status/1414551059528306688 https://twitter.com/alphaINTEL/status/1414551059528306688

aasasd 5y ago

I could vaguely imagine someone wanting to snag the domain from the original dev for fifty bucks and spin up a site to ‘save reddit videos... if you give us your phone number’.