People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn’t any where close to that. Probably hasn’t been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don’t seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.

In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you’re left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.

Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.

What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that’s what librarians do.

If I had the power I’d take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.

I taunted a anon about using reddit and the next day my IP range was banned.

I think in theory simple check such as edits to the majority of a profile would be enough to detect it.

FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.

I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.

Their post history was discoverable by using " site:reddit.com" on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.

So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.

We forgot for a while because the zeitgeist went back to the geopolitics of “Russia and China bad”.

I hadn’t learned enough about how to use it back then.

Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.

It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.

Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.

The tech industry is so massive with so much opportunity abound. It’s not been difficult to work for a company with morals.

There’s also some metadynamics to be noted here. It’s basically impossible to talk about these issues online because so many are tech nerds who sold their soul to big tech a long time ago.

I thought that’s gentoo.