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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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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piracy has been removed again
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
Piracy is a right of the people as far I’m concerned, a way to fight back against corruption
“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.
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.
To all the people saying “too late, I already switched”: why bother commenting?
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.
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 .
Hey that’s great, good job! I’m so unused to any disappointing decision being reversed, this really is an amazing site.
Never should have blocked them in the first place.
I am fairly sure that good parts of that post are lies, I looked quite close at the situation when it happened and from all I could find those “takedown requests” was a single troll who got banned dbzer0 for their right extreme garbage. You also made claims about unmoderated illegal material in those communities which was simply wrong but I would have understood the move if you explained it like you do here right from the start and it’s great to see a mistake reversed! I am not going to pretend that this Federation while not actually illegal can’t cause annoyances and it’s great to see you reverse it despite that, keep it up! :)
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Show me someone who claims to have always been legit and I show you someone who has lied at least once.
I don’t mind piracy much but don’t rely on it anymore.
But I can perfectly understand if Lemmy wants to distance from Pirate/Warez Sites. Those Sites may cooperate between themselves but not within the Lemmy Backbone.
I have love/hate relationship with piracy. I love doing it but hate when it’s done with my products.
what are some of your products?
Nothing significant till now
okay… such as?
