Dex 🔞

from what i've heard, it's a ban handed down directly from the man himself. that answers that question! maybe it was because i told someone to fuck off for accusing me of being the same group that "doxxed" nc. lol

i wrote some crap on twitter about it, but the details:

• i have access to the formerly-affiliated-with-rhdn discord server's staff channel, and was given that access shortly after the site was made read only, to help coordinate possible transition efforts.
• there is no evidence of the supposed "doxxing". the closest thing to that was the staff trying to find nightcrawler's email address, because the site had been down for an extended period and he was nowhere to be found. (remember: the discord was created in 2017. nightcralwer did not ever actually join it until basically when he shut the site down!)
• the costs of the site do not make sense. i host tcrf.net, a fairly large wiki, imo. our total storage is about 350GB (media) + 65GB (OS+files+database), our bandwidth is under 7 TB/month. the rhdn archive was 12 GB. our base costs do not exceed $200/month, while their S3 bucket costs $200+/mo -- and that's just the images/files, not the actual web hosting, and it's supposedly much cheaper than what it was before!! these costs do not make ANY sense.
• the person who hosts that s3 bucket? and pays for it? not nightcralwer, and also not welcome on the forums -- yep, they're banned too!

nightcrawler is a fuckin coward and him comparing himself or his treatment to Near is beyond tasteless, it is infuriating.

edit:
i should mention that the person who is currently paying for the s3 bucket has made it clear to nightcrawler that they are turning that off on the 20th (two weeks from when they sent the notice). so, that'll be exciting!

according to the formerly-associated-with-rhdn discord's staff chat, nightcrawler is just outright ip banning them and deleting their accounts now, so seems nightcrawler is in full meltdown mode.

sure hope someone archived the forum before today, and ideally before he made a huge swath of it patreon-only a while ago, but. oh well.

not much you can do when someone's intent on burning down their library.

(from)

they're providing zero evidence for this, just unilaterally taking tracks (and entire albums associated with them) down. and notably are doing it to artist just big enough that it's a few bucks, but not so big that their post will go viral and end up in the news cycle, or enough that they would have any feasible legal recourse.

but imagine doing this to hundreds of thousands of artists, that's a lot of "a few bucks" they don't have to pay out. hmm! 🤔

i am absolutely convinced this is a systematic thing on their end and that it's deliberate. spotify is literally the sheriff from nottingham out here.

these are just the ones i happen to see on my timeline. i'm furious.

(ps. @mwgewehr & @floopy r on here, show them some love if you can, buy their stuff on bandcamp etc, and this is singto conley's bandcamp)

i truly wonder how many people this is affecting and whether a class action lawsuit is feasible. so mad

Fuck Spotify always. Alternatives are at times only slightly better but Spotify I think gets to throw its weight around in a way i don’t see the other services doing quite as much

here's the thing

i am willing to entertain these messages as genuine
but the threat model has changed

in years past, sure, artificial streams might indicate an artist is up to something, there would be little incentive for anyone else to do it

but the year is 2024.
AI companies want all the data they do not have the license to use
and most of them are absolute shit at coding scrapers, resulting in big websites being hit millions of times per minute
and if they pointed the video sludge machine at netflix, they've absolutely pointed the audio sludge machine at spotify - and it makes logical sense that "artists just big enough to show up in search or a playlist somewhere, but not BIG artists" would be predominantly affected by this

the fuck spotify here is for continuing to blame the artist for something that no longer makes sense as their fault
and the AI companies continue making the internet worse in their own way