Reddit has shut down a three-year-old hub of Switch piracy discussion after the Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaks brought it a new level of infamy.
To be clear, it's uncertain whether the shutdown is directly tied to the Tears of the Kingdom leaks, but given that r/NewYuzuPiracy was around for three years but exploded in popularity over the past month, it's not difficult to suspect that there's some correlation here.
As PC Gamer reports, r/NewYuzuPiracy had nearly doubled in size since May 1, when Tears of the Kingdom first began leaking onto pirate sites, and in that time had become a hub of discussion for both piracy and modding of the new Zelda game.
As the name suggests, this subreddit was originally built as a replacement for the similarly-banned r/YuzuPiracy. If you try to head to r/NewYuzuPiracy now, you'll see the message that "this subreddit was banned due to a violation of Reddit's content policy against creating or repurposing a sub to reconstitute or serve the same objective as a previously banned or quarantined subreddit." It seems it just took Reddit three years to get around to enforcing that policy.
While Reddit doesn't have a direct ban on discussion of piracy, the site's content policy does have a rule to "avoid posting illegal content or soliciting or facilitating illegal or prohibited transactions." Despite that, much larger forums centered on piracy - like r/Piracy - have seen no action taken against them, though the moderators of several such forums have taken them private in protest of Reddit's unrelated crackdown on third-party apps.
Other content hosts have been getting skittish in the wake of Nintendo's redoubled efforts to crack down on piracy, as with the confusing aftermath of Valve's
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