Reuters has this nasty-assed paywall I only noticed just the other day. Not sure if it’s new or if I just somehow managed to miss it.

The scrubbed data is here, not hard to find, all in a 91 MB 7z archive. https://old.reddit.com/r/piracy/b3zzzp/

Sure. And I can go read cuneiform tablets to find out what the ancient Babylonians had to say.

Shutting down the entire subreddit would have been worse

How? If shut down, then there would be no forum. And the other option, there was the appearance of a forum, where nothing of substance about the topic it was founded upon could be discussed.

This wasn’t about people posting torrent links (or not just that). They were nuking all sorts of shit. Discussions of when torrents might become available in the future, technical details on how anything worked, release names. You name it, anything of interest was gone (and that’s only from that point going forward, literally everything going backwards was scrubbed and scrubbed hard).

When a large social media platform continues to exist, even if it’s bad, even if it’s unusable… it sucks the oxygen out of the room. Often making it impossible for anything else to take its place, even if that substitute would fix those problems. By keeping that forum around, it starved out other possible venues for years.

It wasn’t the right call. It just happened to be the only call where he got to continue to “be in charge”. Which is the thing he’s most concerned about here, with this post.

and the old posts were archived, so the post link removal is not an issue.

That’s great for historiants in the 26th century, they have access to all of those posts. For the vast majority of human beings alive today, they are effectively gone. They cannot be found without extraordinary, heroic efforts. Which no one will bother to do, because if they knew what it was they were looking for exactly, there’d be no reason to search in the first place.

“Don’t worry that he burned down the public library, some millionaire book collector who lives in Europe somewhere has private copies of all the rare editions!”

The talk of an exodus being possible in the first place here, is because it was not shut down back then.

That exodus happened way back then. Just no one noticed because they had a heavily-censored forum with enough activity that it looked like something was going on.

So you destroyed the village in order to save it? You did lose the subreddit anyway. Nothing could ever be discussed. Everyone self-censored even if you didn’t force the issue on them.

The admins did it. But instead of them doing it despite your efforts, you cooperated. Hell, even that might be forgivable if afterward you’d realized the mistake you made and owned up to it. Instead, you’re here defending it.

What great lessons have you learned, that the same or similar wouldn’t be repeated here? I mean, another person might have spent years struggling with and straining their brain to figure out how to make a forum that assholes like the reddit admins can’t nuke. No, your best is apparently waiting for someone else to come up with a possible solution, and then just migrating over to it until the copyright trolls catch up and start lobbing legal thermonukes in this direction. Then I guess you’ll cooperate again, and wait for yet another forum to be created somewhere else, only to repeat the pattern.

Supposing that somehow “well run” means anything that anyone else agrees with, aren’t you sort of the poster child of “not well run”? During your tenure at reddit, for instance, r/piracy became almost entirely useless. Years of prime advice was nuked when you erased everything but the last 6 months of history. Rules, and also secret rules, were enacted that make it impossible to discuss anything important. Contributors were banned form the subreddit having already demonstrated their worth.

As it is now, if the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with the Spanish priests who burned the Mayan codices to run a piracy internet forum, they still wouldn’t do as shitty a job as r/piracy does. If you had any sort of integrity at all, wouldn’t you have shut down the forum years ago?