Not all of the moderators were in favor of the mass deletion since that, of course, deletes the community’s history too. It’s unclear when this sweeping process with be fully completed, but it’s hoped that it can keep the community alive. “Given the speed, this might take weeks,” says moderator ‘dbzer0’, a nine-year veteran of the sub-Reddit. A script was created and put into motion and the purge began. All that was left was to find a way to begin deleting history, around 9.5 years of posts. Uncertain of what lay in the archives and only being in a strong position to be absolutely certain of the state of play more recently, they asked the community for input on the ‘ Nuclear Option‘ – deleting every post older than six months old, just to be sure.Īfter the votes were counted, those in favor of deleting the archives outnumbered those asking for preservation by ten to one. This left the moderators of /r/piracy with a huge dilemma. Is there anything in there that could warrant a surprise complaint? Apparently so, since rightsholders have been digging up issues from the past and complaining to Reddit.
It’s nothing less than self-censorship in response to sloppy and/or fraudulent claims, but these are testing times.īut the really big issue here relates to the huge archive of posts already present on /r/piracy – some ten years’ worth of discussions. We recently had an April Fool’s ‘Avengers: Endgame’ release post hit r/all and while the community was happy to meme on being fooled, a few users were concerned that copyright holders might act on it and have it removed.” “We have had days when releases were the highlight of the day filled with hundreds of comments of excited people discussing the film. “I have begun unofficially removing release posts and it’s quite sad considering that a rather large bulk of our users look forward to them every day, I know I did,” moderator ‘ dysgraphical‘ informs TF.
As a result, those posts too are now being removed, as quickly as the mods can reach them.
Even people simply posting names of releases are being flagged for copyright infringement, something that isn’t illegal in any form. Meanwhile, the notices keep building up, despite best efforts and whether they’re valid or not. If a user makes a post that results in a copyright notice, only that user (or Reddit’s admins) are in a position to dispute the claim with the notice sender, so that rarely happens. We’ve seen the same kind of issues before, when copyright holders have made attempts to have site homepages delisted from Google, despite their content never appearing there.įurther complicating the process is that the moderators of /r/piracy have no ability to respond to potentially false allegations. This placed the forum’s moderators between a rock and a hard place.Īccording to some of the copyright notices filed with Reddit, simply posting an alleged pirate site homepage URL warranted a complaint, even when that URL didn’t link to any infringing content. While some complaints were legitimate (some people simply won’t abide by the rules and some posts do get missed), many were not. Just a handful of days later, however, the moderators received notice from Reddit that they were receiving too many copyright complaints from rightsholders.įor a sub-Reddit that has strict rules forbidding anyone posting links to infringing content, the notification came as a disappointment. In an article published mid-March 2019, we reported how the moderators of the forum were making best efforts to keep content on the right side of the law and within Reddit’s rules. Recently we’ve reported on the troubles being faced by /r/piracy, Reddit’s most popular sub-Reddit focused on piracy discussion. The site plays host to millions of live discussions on countless topics ranging from the mundane to obviously controversial. With around a quarter of a billion monthly users, Reddit is one of the most important sites on the Internet.