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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by InternetPirate@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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?

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[-] 312@lemm.ee 220 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] gjghkk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[-] lemann@lemmy.one 8 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] gjghkk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] SynopticVision@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

I could never wrap my head around the concept of "karma farming"

[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] chanunnaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] 312@lemm.ee 7 points 2 years ago

I think it’s less about keeping the community small and more about not incentivizing karma or whatever scoring equivalent exists.

[-] qimdbxfk6@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago

I hope Lemmy doesn't put in karma-like points here. Some people make a shit post to farm that karma.

[-] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

But dopamine addict monkey brain love number go up!

[-] Stelus42@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] Paradox@lemdro.id 5 points 2 years ago

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

[-] Cranksta@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 years ago

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.

[-] Paradox@lemdro.id 5 points 2 years ago

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"

[-] Cranksta@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 years ago

Well yeah, but I've never been bothered by that. I just tab away.

this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
594 points (100.0% liked)

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