
Reddit's /r/Piracy is deleting almost ten years of history to avoid ban - okket
https://torrentfreak.com/reddits-r-piracy-deleting-almost-10-years-of-history-to-avoid-ban-190407/
======
schrectacular
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.

~~~
black_puppydog
After the new EU copyright directive passed parliament, I went on a bit of a
hunt for reasons. Outside Germany, we simply didn't get traction for protest.
And one reason people gave was "it won't be enforcable anyhow".

This here clearly shows what Germans have known for years thanks to our stupid
"Abmahnwesen" legal abnormality: enforcement is not the bottleneck when
private entities sue other private entities. It won't be a Hadopi-style
government institution petitioning $youtube to take down any videos at the
threat of a mild fine. It will be $sony suing the crap out of $youtube with
the prospect of millions and millions in reparations. There is zero reason to
believe they will be anything less than maximally-aggressive in doing so, and
so they will provide all the incentive $youtube needs to block everything that
has a hint of a smell of copyrighted material.

And bear in mind, the EU regulation defines $youtube in a way that potentially
includes most small forum operators, virtually every community built by a
small corporation etc. And there's equally no reason to believe those will be
spared by the copyright industry and their lawyers.

~~~
gumby
> And one reason people gave was "it won't be enforcable anyhow".

This has been a surprisingly common view in France* for a long time. I
consider it an unfortunate attitude that breeds cynicism and allows laws to be
passed that simply express a desire, rather than laws that might make things
better. I understand there can be protest exhaustion and one has to pick one's
battles.

* I mention France by name only because the only European countries I've lived in are France and Germany.

------
supernes
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
There's something heartwarming about 4chan remaining committed to being
absolute cancer.

~~~
wsgeorge
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
_> 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
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.

~~~
notthemessiah
> Political arguments that differ from the mainstream

That is a polite way of describing anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories such
as Q-Anon.

~~~
nyolfen
yes, and twitter is nothing except a polite way to say cyberbullying

------
kyriakos
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
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
that makes it sound far more inevitable than it really is.

~~~
mcguire
It sure looks inevitable.

~~~
black_puppydog
_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.

------
Mediterraneo10
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
Dunno man, but I hope it survives. Even if it is banned, maybe it'll pop up as
a different community elsewhere?

~~~
Aromasin
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
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
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

~~~
mkbkn
Thanks for the guidance.

Most of my interests revolves around business, masterminds, entrepreneurship,
freelancing etc.

~~~
Aromasin
Try Disboard.org - I found a few decent ones on there, and slowly networked my
way into a few private ones. Some occasionally pop up in HN comments also. I
left a lot of servers recently so I'm afraid I don't have any to offer you for
those topics specifically.

~~~
mkbkn
Okay. Thanks for the help.

------
m-p-3
I have an IPFS archive available here, feel free to pin it to your node.

[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7Q...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7QJEsWu4m/)

~~~
Majestic121
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
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.

------
Pizzaputer
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.

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dspillett
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/downloadin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6lqbsd/downloading_reddit/)

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.

------
rel2thr
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
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.

~~~
oligopoly
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

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black_puppydog
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.

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IloveHN84
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
I wonder why regulations target content sharing platforms, not the content
itself. or the ads companies.

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

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

------
mindslight
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
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.

~~~
mxfh
"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
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
Twitter was started as any easy way to send group texts via SMS, before phones
would widely support group texting.

------
klntsky
/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.

~~~
morganvachon
I don't go on /r/Piracy, but from my understanding there were already rules in
place, and heavily enforced, about not linking to infringing content, and it
was supposed to be just a place to discuss piracy. How is simple discussion of
a topic infringing at all? How did they deserve this purge?

It's exactly this attitude that has a chilling effect on all speech, no matter
the subject. You should be ashamed.

~~~
klntsky
> It's exactly this attitude that has a chilling effect on all speech, no
> matter the subject.

No, it isn't. The lack of precaution and inability to decently set up a forum
software is.

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

~~~
rlue
Culture != commerce. The very fact that piracy is sustained by volunteer
communities should speak for itself here, but if you need more evidence,
consider:

> The scope of music collected on What.cd was almost incomprehensibly vast:
> More than a million distinct “releases” of songs, albums, and bootlegs.

> Bach cello suites. Obscure Chinese indie rock. Nigerian hip-hop. Thai psych-
> funk from the 1970s. Every release of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, including
> vinyl rips and remasters. UK techno tracks that were pressed on vinyl in the
> 90s, with only a few hundred copies made, and uploaded by dedicated crate-
> diggers.

> The collections of Spotify and Apple Music may seem infinite, but What.cd
> had thousands of albums that were not available anywhere else—and now, are
> not available anywhere at all. The site had about 800,000 artists as of
> early 2016...

from [https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-
great...](https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-greatest-
music-collection-in-the-world/)

~~~
Freak_NL
Piracy may well be a requirement for culture to survive beyond that which is
mandated and approved by the major content owners.

In fact, once something enters the public domain, copying it, consuming it,
drawing attention to it, documenting it, analysing it, archiving it, reusing
it, in short, _using_ it; is absolutely vital to keep those facets of culture
a part of our heritage. And it is completely legal.

But between the public domain and the moment cultural artefacts are created is
a vast gap where copyright shields everything from those acts, even when
nobody is monetizing it, and when all that stands between losing it forever
and maintaining it for future generations is a couple of pirates who ripped a
copy at an opportune moment.

The current copyright status quo is killing culture. 28 years of copyright
protects the creator, life plus 100 years just protects the profits of some
faceless megacorporation or rent-seeking artist's estate.

