*arrs auto downloading stuff for sure.
What’s funny is that the source those *arrs are downloading from is largely unchanged from the 90’s &aughts by still being newsgroup based
Yeah, I’ve been using newsgroups since the 90s back when I was also using xdcc on irc. Times were quite different.
Funny thing, I tried using newsgroups for their intended purpose after rediscovering that Thunderbird is also a newsreader. The amount of topics is large (and really old), but the ones I checked out haven’t had many updates. Though i admit I haven’t been brave enough to dive into the alt. group yet. It reminds me of the internet before the web.
…thats because newsgroups have been around a lot longer than the web?
Well, yeah. My first interaction with the internet was a friend’s technical savvy dad who had compuserve.
Funny thing is that the only reason I’ve found *arrs a few years ago was Netflix deciding to be stupid, making me look at how I can manage my local library better nowadays.
yourpiratedmovie.exe
Thanks, Limewire!
Who else downloaded LimeWire Pro using LimeWire?
Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That’s the biggest change.
The reason of pirating things because you would be offline has mostly disappeared. Partially because mobile data has become more affordable but also because more subscription based apps give you some way to consume content offline.
Where I see this the most is with music. Outside of those who want FLAC quality I don’t know of a lot of people who pirate music anymore.
One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It’s how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.
The thing to remember is that internet and cellular service wasn’t available everywhere. I had to talk 10 minutes to a hill to get service to be able to make a cellular phone call. Most internet options required landline phones and wifi was barely off the ground for most consumers.
Media was something we extracted from the internet. Now the internet is something we have to extract ourselves from.
If I had the power today I’d bring back services that were shamed into actually providing a reasonably priced service that offers good value.
I don’t like pirating, I’d rather pay a fair price for services since I want those services to continue but I’m not fucking paying 15/month to watch a single show I’d enjoy.
In the late 90s and very early 00’s you could
googleyahoo song names and get a downloadable mp3 link as one of the first results.Having no filtering certainly had its pros and cons, considering how much traumatizing shit google would throw at me as a child lol
Yep, too much of search engines today is people pushing SEO crap to rise in rankings and the businesses “protecting” users by delisting tons of sites that Google/Yahoo or who-the-fuck-ever has decided are “bad.” The number of times legitimate sites get swept up in that bullshit is too damn high.
early ’00s*
It’s largely the same because we started out with mostly enthusiasts doing it in semi hidden places. Then it was mainstreamed and became too easy for casuals to do out in the open. So laws and enforcement caught up and now it’s most effective again if you know your way around, which most casuals won’t if they can afford a few streaming services.
One big change is no longer having to burn any media, you download something then it’s on plex and you can watch it instantly.
If I could bring anything back from the 90s it would be a big selection of games, movies, tv, music, and books that I actually care enough to consume. There’s hardly anything worth downloading anymore.
Plex is likely spying on you. It’s a binary blob with financial aspirations. It takes less than a few MB to upload your entire database to their servers.
Probably right, but at least my watch history is all attached to a throwaway email address I use for it.
I really miss the original Napster. I got so many good songs off of there. Now I really don’t know where to find new music that I’m going to like. I feel like I’ve listed to most of the stuff out there (even though I know that’s impossible), or it’s just not a unique sound. Everything just seems to blend together even on a “discovery” mix seeded with artists I don’t listen to much.
yeah, I’d really like a thing like jellyseerr that’s easy to hook into the *arrs for browsing for suggested/popular/new music.
You can get an entire album or discography now. Back then I remember getting random loose mp3s of artists I was interested in, dictated by how many seeds happened to be online. Not sure I would bring that back, but it did make for some deep cuts becoming my favourite songs and not just the well known “hits” from albums.
The most dramatic change is probably how easy it is to hear any of that music in a legit way, and hear it instantly.
This is how I stumbled onto Soulseek—I needed albums, not tracks
I burned CDs just titled “Pink Floyd”, “Beatles” or “Radiohead” with their entire discography of mp3s on it. I really got deep into a lot of bands back then.
How much easier it’s gotten and most of what you download nowadays is usually exactly what you’re looking for. In the 90’s/00’s, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener “What the fuck are you doing?” At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I’m probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.
I think with torrenting, there’s a certain amount of trust that’s inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there’s 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn’t be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don’t pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don’t know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it’s not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it’s better to be safe about that stuff.
’90s*/’00s* a lot*
We torrented so many movies, so so many movies. It quit being a question of what we wanted to watch and just became a game of how much can I get today. Then I just wandered away from it one day. I never received any letters. I do have a friend who got a letter from Lucas.
Closing Time is no longer by Green Day
I KNOW WHOOOO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME
Every comedy song was by weird al
Primus had its own genre tag
Id actually bring back the power to pirate.
The amount of effort that has gone into trying to extract every possible stream dollar makes me just wanna fuck the system. I am happy to pay to watch or play something, but pirating is the only way to get it without being ripped, “this is no longer available” or “buy this other platform and make an account”.
Steam and GoG got alot of my money because I could buy what I actually wanted. I would have happily paid for a soap2day app that allowed me to just select and watch stuff. The amount of 90s cartoons I could show the kids…
Downloading a movie only to find out it was actually porn.
Or the other way around.
And a whole lot of content that I frankly would have preferred not to have seen.
When you’re 12 and your parents have no idea what you’re doing, you’ll end up in very dark corners.
rotten.c0m?
Christ, that brings back unpleasant memories…
Pretty sure it was spelt wrong and had one ‘t’
Seen some deeply dark shit for a 10 year old
Downloading a movie only to find it was the pain Olympics or a cartel/terrorist beheading was also fun
