Hello World!
As we’ve all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !piracy@lemmy.ml, and their local counterparts as follow up actions.
In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn’t want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.
Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it’s time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!
We know it’s been a rough ride with everything, and we’d like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.
With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!
Lemmy.world Team
❤️
This is what I like to see. Not just heels digging in, but explanations as to why, the follow-ups, the investigation of options and follow through. Thanks for the transparency. Piracy has and won’t ever go away. I used to pirate due to lack of money and resources. When I had those I went legit. When legit sources started turning into:
- monthly subscriptions for everything
- when legit sources suddenly delete or remove content from their systems (to avoid paying taxes?)
- when the rates go up for everything (internet access AND streaming services)
- now ads in your paid services unless you pay more (Amazon)
- Plex trying to go legit and police where and how people run their private streaming, fucking over license holders who built the financial footing they could stand on in the first place. Cool.
You can’t rely on any shit from these services, except for one shit… enshittification.
I don’t want to sound negative, but as a consumer, it’s been nothing but ads rammed down our throats from everywhere we go and look. They lie, they change rates, they shrinkflate, while their pockets get bigger. Long live piracy.
From lemmy.world’s perspective, I get it. Our current legal framework makes it damn near impossible from a financial standpoint to take a stand against corporations with pocketbooks the size of some first world countries.
But the rise in piracy is a direct consequence of these corporations’ actions against their very users.
Piracy has and always will be a service problem. I don’t think lemmy should be used to share torrents for example. But honest discussion about the current state of affairs and alternatives should be allowed.
The admins took a measured approach here and it’s one that is refreshing given the regime that many of us came from.
One of the reasons I explore the high seas is that some shows I want to watch are not legally available to watch in my region at all.
the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.
content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money
so it seems to me there are three paths here:
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the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)
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the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price
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studios branch off into competing streaming services
i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out
Netflix caused movie pracy to nearly case, because was affordable and convenient. People preferred to pay than hunt and download movies.
Once other studios started creating their streaming services, applying exclusivity for shows, jacking prices for their content (encouraging ads) all went to hell. They successfully managed to ruin the experience, and make it as shitty as cable.
The thing about intellectual property is that you create it once and then you can copy it infinitely and generate profit. The studios want to maximize the profit, it isn’t (as you are suggesting) how hard was to create content, but it is how much people are ok paying. It always was.
They can do this, because there’s monopoly due to crippled antitrust laws in the last 50 years.
Piracy is a natural response to this, but they are using copyright (which was originally meant for different reason).
Antitrust laws as well as laws like copyright, DMCA etc needs to be fixed.
this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.
netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons
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they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.
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netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.
basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.
The music streaming platforms (admittedly with their own challenges) have to compete based on service offering rather than exclusivity. Imagine if all the streaming platforms competed on quality of service instead of exclusivity.
I’d personally pay a lot more if I could just have one service that had all the content I want, but instead we’re in this situation where the platforms (in my opinion) are lacking innovation and the content is all over the show. Here in NZ I find different seasons on different platforms or plenty of shows that just aren’t licensed for our market. We all know how that problems going to be solved.
the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.
the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.
to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.
Not saying that you shouldn’t pay people, but the CEO of netflix makes over $50M a year. Actors make how much? I’m sure there are a lot of ways to cut costs and make a more equal society to boot.
obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill
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their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have.
Isn’t the money for producing shows included in their operating costs, meaning that their operating margin already accounts for that?
“Content” at a minimum requires a video camera and people to stand in front of it. It’s involving hundreds of people in a production that’s expensive. People just hurl money at big centralized services, with the same mentality they had with cable TV, and of course they spend ungodly amounts, because they make even more. There’s all kinds of models that can work better than this.
i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out
They don’t. They just think content is generated in a vacuum and it’s their right to consume it in whatever way they see fit.
The solution is not one many people want to hear: reduce production costs.
Content is expensive to make mostly because the people making it keep demanding more pay for less work. While it is understandable that people want this, this is not sustainable for an economy. When the economy fails, prices go up. Demanding employers pay more will immediately raise prices the same amount the wages increase, effectively leaving employees who got a raise in the same place they were before but eith bigger numbers, and severely damaging the economy at the same time.
A show can be produced on a shoestring budget. Yes, the quality is lower than a million dollar movie. However, that doesn’t make the show bad. The X-Files was a great show produced on a tiny budget in its first season with phenomenal writing. Yet in the final season, it had a bigger budget but the writing was awful. In fact, most shows these days have awful writing. And the writers of these shows with bad writing are demanding more pay, yet their writing quality does not indicate they deserve increased pay. Certainly if a writer is outputting great work that should be rewarded, but increasing the pay of writers outputting garbage writing can only lead to more expensive garbage.
Then you get to costume, props, and visual effects. First, the damaged economy from before appears in costumes and props material cost. This is unavoidable. In many cases, I would say that good practical effects are cheaper and more convincing than cheap CG. My solution is simply go back to the way films were made in the 70s and 80s. Ditch the bad CG and go for more practical effects.
Last we have actors. Actors do not need more than 100k per film, and thats for the huge actors. Simple to understand, really. So many actors live opulent, overpaid lives, when they could live more simply, more normally, off of much less.
The above aalso applies to directors, producers, streaming company executives and CEOs.
Fix all these and your show production costs plummet. Now you can offer your streaming service at the same cost or cheaper than before while having a larger profit margin.
Idk why you’re leading with writer pay, going into actor pay (most don’t make squat) and then execs at the big companies involved are tossed in as an afterthought. Probably why you’re getting downvoted.
I am getting downvoted because people cant bother to read beyond one sentence.
Also, I dont care about imaginary internet points.
Dude if writers actually made enough money then it wouldn’t be such a huge thing that they get sponsored free lunches during the strike. Thats a fucking meal… However the profit produced on some shows is obscene in comparison. Put 300 mil in and get 500 mil out, thats 200 mil profit… You’re getting downvoted because you don’t understand the economics of the industry while being overconfident that you do.
Why would a writer make a good story for someone paying them in dogshit and loose change?
no one will ever get me to pay for ads
I don’t know where this comes from. Ads are a currency. You choose to allow ads to replace or supplement your payment, or you can choose to pay to forego them, on most all of these services. That’s not an option we ever had with cable (or any type of social media, for that matter).
Running these services costs money and you pay money to fund them. These industries have operating at a loss for many years and they are just getting around to being profitable, and they do that by increasing costs.
If you don’t want to pay for the service, just be upfront and say so.
Cable WAS the solution to adds in the beginning, that’s how it was marketed in the first place. The cycle is not new.
Yes I understand that
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More price hikes! More Ads! More tracking!
Plex can go can screw themselves. I’ve been self hosting for over a decade (and stupidly spent hundreds of dollars on a PlexPass instead of buying a lifetime one early on) and finally decided to move to the cloud. Two weeks later I get an email saying that they’re blocking my connection in about 3 weeks and to move to a more expensive hosting company if I want to avoid getting blocked. I’m not the one violating their ToS, but yet I’m getting screwed.
Wait, what happened with Plex? I’m in the dark on that one.
There’s a bunch of analytics tracking and cloud integration in Plex. They are interested in what users are watching, which is concerning.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/7bim8n/plex_analytics_analyticsplextv/
Switch to Jellyfin or another open source server.
This is unrelated to the piracy topic at hand.
Plex has recently started cracking down on public servers suspected of piracy. I haven’t heard anything about private servers getting harassed (and I’ve yet to be bothered about mine), but the servers where people pay $1/month or whatever to access someone else’s server have been targeted.
Yep I pirated all music in college when I was poor. Now that I am not poor, I buy it all from Bandcamp.
Bandcamp was nice while it lasted https://www.wired.com/story/epic-games-sale-bandcamp-music-platform-limbo/
Ugh
Yet another informative post, and a decision that takes some guts and you’re willing to take on some extra work and risk in order to make the instance better
I didn’t want to have to do this, but you’ve brought this upon yourself. You give me no choice but to… donate money to you which you so damn well deserve!
Let this be a reminder that actions have consequences!
Let this be a reminder that actions have consequences!
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN… WHEN WILL YOU LEARN… THAT YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CoNcEqUeNcEs
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN… WHEN WILL YOU LEARN… THAT YOUR ACTIONS HAVE CoNcEqUeNcEs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think this is the mark of a decent admin team, the ability to re-evaluate a decision based on new or better data. I’m more inclined to stick with lemmy.world in the future, even through decisions I don’t necessarily agree with .
Whereas on Reddit, it’d be used to justify a slippery slope. “We’ve already banned X and Y, so banning Z is just an extension of that.”
Even better, they did this because they knew it was unpopular with people and have since been trying to find a solution. That’s an excellent leadership quality.
I’m glad you guys took a measured approach. This right here is the difference between a corporation and Lemmy. I can’t imagine a for-profit reversing its decision in the interest of the community unless it affected their bottom line or stock price. Hats off to the admin team for working through all these complex issues.
Hey that’s great, good job! I’m so unused to any disappointing decision being reversed, this really is an amazing site.
Now please unremove the shroom community as next priority. Empowering open minded people with the option and knowledge to heal themselves through the use of psychadelics (and other kinds of mushrooms that can potentially help fight diseases such as cancer) that they can grow themselves without big pharma and giving them a community to share their advice+experiences is the right thing to do.
Since its Lemmy world its a weird indeed. Mushrooms are not even illegal in like 1/3rd of the world countries and decriminalized/not enforced in the other 3rd. Pretty interesting wiki read actually https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_psilocybin_mushrooms
Any context why it was blocked?
There’s been a few poisonings lately, including half a dozen people in Australia about 2 months back that may have contributed… orrrr it might just be US law and broad optics.
I’m not sure the mushrooms used in thr Australian case were magic mushrooms. That’d be more about mycology rather than magic mushrooms we’re talking about. Either way banning doesn’t make much sense.
correct, am Australian. The mushrooms are called death cap here which are poisonous. they were used in a mea and it’s suspected to be a deliberate poisoning. nothing recreational or accidental here, just the same usual shit that can kill you in Australia :)
deleted by creator
Oh - they definitely weren’t magic mushrooms, but people will definitely overlay the general danger of amateur mycology over the risk and (US) illegality over the magic mushrooms.
Next thing we should block any car community. Cars kill people.
Ban all communities because humans kill people.
Gee if only I knew a place where I could learn more about this.
/s
I spoke with 4 therapists about issues I had, they didn’t help. Microdosing LSD for about a month did wonders though.
I can echo this statement for a couple people I know that found this to work for them too
They’re really interesting substances with useful properties, but we know so little about them.
This is weird to me. What’s the reasoning for that? We’re people selling crap on there or something? If it’s just discussion I really do not see the problem.
If you want people to take your hobby seriously, drop the cult language. Seriously, healing yourself? Fighting cancer?
Come on now, next you’re going to try to sell me crystals that absorb bad vibes or something.
This reads as bait to me. You can see multiple peoples testimonies in the replies confirming that psychedelics succeeded in helping them or those they personally know, where repeated conventional therapy failed them. The long term repairing improvement of a persons mental and spiritual well-being also counts as ‘healing’ to me as well as many other people.
In the off chance you are genuinely interested in the ‘helps fight disease such as cancer’ claim, here is a ted talk by a professional mycologist. Its about mushrooms improving the human immune system. At the end he shares the very personal story of his elderly mother developing stage 4 breast cancer basically being told she was too old for conventional treatments and was done for. Only for her to make a full recovery after taking a few medications along with turkey tail mushrooms. You can skip to 9:00 to hear the story.
Fantastic Fungi is a good documentary on netflix if you would like to learn more, very well made and accessible to the common person IMO
Thats all I have to say. I hope you are open minded and learn something new if you decide to check out the ted talk and documentary. If you think its all snake oil BS anyways there probably isn’t much I can say to sway your opinion. Hope you have a good one.
My opposition was not in regards to the contents of what they said, but rather in how they said it.
Not a single person unaware of psychedelics would ever take that sort of language seriously. As I said, they need to drop the cult language, the anti-science language, and explain things in a way people would at least consider- much like you did.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thank you for the very informative post. Your professional way of handling the issue, puts corporate professionals, “cough” Reddit “cough”, look like the amateurs they really are
That’s what I thought while reading this. After being on reddit for so long posts like these are such a breathe of fresh air. In my time on Reddit the trend was ALWAYS 1: bad changes 2: worse change 3: nothing, it just becomes the new normal then, if anything 4: even worse changes.
Blows my mind to see a site be cognizant of their users, listen to them and actually idk, work to fix things? Bravo.
You forgot the random instant site-wide permabans without explanation or possibility for appeal.
Wow, I had actually forgotten about those. Not to mention that every time I checked my inbox I was being blanket banned from a host of subs because I had accidentally commented to a no-no sub, or said something mildly controversial… I’m not even that controversial of a person haha but not fitting in perfectly and submitting to the echo chambers meant punishment… just so strange
As always, appreciate both the transparency and the hard work and effort to make sure you are doing what is best for the community even if it isn’t always easy! ♥️
❤️
Absolutely right
“Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.”
A lesson u/spez forgot.
Nah, currently u/spez is Counting his money for the next increase of API costs.
This line is best if spoken like a pirate
This is my first comment ever using this platform.
Welcome aboard! 😎
@antidote101 @lwadmin Welcome💞
Hey thanks! Feels good to be away from Reddit!
@antidote101 Yeah absolutely! Enjoy…🤗
you want a brownie button?
What exactly do you think the upvote button is? You know brown is just a shade of orange.
Are those the little mini brownie things? If so, yes, that sounds delightful.
Glad I can use this as my main instance again. Love the transparency of the mod team even if I don’t always agree with the decisions.
We can’t always please everyone. And sometimes we have to make decisions or do things we personally don’t like or we would like to see differently but we have to think about both our team and our userbase.
But thank you for your trust and welcome back.
These posts reassure me that I chose the right instance. Thank you!
What does instance do exactly? I’m using boost for lemmy and just picked the first one on the list…
It’s basically your entry point into the fediverse. You can still read and comment on other instances, as long as your instance is playing nice with others.
You can even set up your own and connect boost to that if you like. You’ll still be part of the bigger 'verse.
Good Communication is the key for everything
Nah man, tried this with my dog. He still humps the pizza delivery guy’s leg
Thank you for doing all of this including writing this post. The haters are binary thinkers who can’t be bothered with pesky things like “context” and “reality”
To all the people saying “too late, I already switched”: why bother commenting?
I think it’s fine and healthy for the fediverse if people spread out across different servers, it distributes the hosting cost.
I don’t see a problem with announcing they “moved and aren’t coming back despite the reversal” on this particular thread, it appears relevant.
Why bother pointing out people commenting? I guess we’re all a little confused.
To explore the human condition 🤠
It’s the same as the people leaving Reddit but still talking about it
To show what happens if you don’t listen to the community before making changes, I’m guessing.
But they are not incentivized to grow numbers exponentially like shareholder funded companies. They make money from community involvement and value-added services. Instead, they removed these type of contents because they felt like those communities needed to reform their overall community personality. In the end, it is all a community effort to help one another. now that users have switched, there is less legal pressure, and the people who moved have helped make these other servers better. It was a win-win for us. I am grateful to all the people who made the move and participated in posting to their respective communities.
Also, this helps lessen the host cost on them. Lastly, a federated community is not the same as these mega corps.
My humble opinion is that the community can fuck off in matters like this. The random poster isn’t risking life-destroying legal trouble like the people running the servers are.
Too late, already commented. And switched. ;)
Well, I did it too, and it is not worth making a whole comment about it because all of our reasons are predictable and this is the Fediverse and spreading is good.
Now, I’m a bit out of the loop with the server uptime and all, but maybe if things are better I can consider Lemmy.world my backup account again… because I don’t really have one anymore.
