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Reddit /r/piracy in turmoil as a mod caught taking bribes to promote posts (www.reddit.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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All the principled pirates have jumped ship to lemmy so it was bound to happen sooner than later.

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[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 285 points 3 months ago

I used to be top mod of piracy until the reddit blackouts last year, where I was demoted by the admins in a secret coup. I was reinstated by other mods, but have been idle since.

sunbothersco is also the top mod in /r/piracy and it mostly maintaining the megathread but is not very active in lemmy.

We absolutely will never boost posts for money here.

[-] Mothra@mander.xyz 75 points 3 months ago

Thanks. That's interesting, I didn't know the mods here were mods there too. I believe people here wouldn't be letting things fall apart (there is a reason people moved away from Reddit and the quality of content here is proof).

I was surprised to see those comments implying the megathread was no longer reliable though, I figured it was a stretch but had no idea why would they be thinking that.

[-] recursive_recursion@programming.dev 26 points 3 months ago

That's interesting, I didn't know the mods here were mods there too.

tbh I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case cause after reddit's self-made implosion with the API access debacle, the majority of us migrated to (fediverse instances such as) mastodon and here

[-] sadbehr@lemmy.nz 17 points 3 months ago

Just wanted to say thank you for your service over the two platforms.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

To be quite honest, I wouldn't mind sponsored posts as a way to support a community or instance, as long as they were completely disclosed as so and if the sponsor had no control over the moderation.

[-] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 64 points 3 months ago

If we get instance sponsors it will probably in the instance sidebar, but for now we don't quite need them

[-] TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 35 points 3 months ago

Fuck ads, they're everywhere at every level. I want to see less of them, not more.

[+] rglullis@communick.news -11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No one is forcing you to see them, especially given that this is an open source system with open source clients.

Also, how much are you paying/contributing to the developers, admins and moderators in order to avoid the need of alternative methods of funding?

[-] sorghum@sh.itjust.works 13 points 3 months ago

I've been saying this for over a year. The era of free stuff on the internet is coming to a close. Be prepared to pay or self host things you're used to getting for free. It's what got me into self hosting.

[-] bizarroland@fedia.io 8 points 3 months ago

I mean, you're definitely not wrong. All of these mbin sites are typically pretty small but once they cross the point where you're looking at getting a second server to keep the site running then prices start to escalate.

Modern servers are pretty good but I believe depending on how well the software is written that should be somewhere around 10,000 concurrent users.

If they are using cloud hosting their prices will escalate alongside their user counts but if they are using co-location or something like that they have to go out and buy additional boxes at the cost of several thousand dollars a piece and pay for extra space in the colocation center.

They should definitely make it easy for us to contribute to running the site or at the very least do regular planned donation drives kind of like Wikipedia.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 3 months ago

I agree so much with you, I am running a commercial provider for Fediverse services for almost five years. The problem is that we are still a very tiny minority relative to the amount of internet users.

[-] Yglorba@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Most likely this incident is an indirect result of that coup. After that, they had to rapidly replenish the mod team and didn't have time to vet people, so they ended up with someone like this.

FWIW my recollection from looking over sunbothersco at the time was that they were a clout-seeker with no meaningful history on /r/piracy - they were repeatedly and aggressively asking to be made top mod of a wide variety of subs at the time, with no real connection between them. It sucks that reddit was forcing out top mods, but I wish they'd at least followed through on their threat to make it democracy, since there's no way we would have ended up with someone like that if the system had been anything but "randomly hand the sub to whoever asks first and loudest."