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?
Pretty sure it was spelt wrong and had one ‘t’
Seen some deeply dark shit for a 10 year old
Christ, that brings back unpleasant memories…
Downloading a movie only to find it was the pain Olympics or a cartel/terrorist beheading was also fun
I had lots of time to play games, but not a lot of money to buy games.
Now it’s the other way round.
If I could bring back anything from back then, it’s boxed PC games that can be resold and traded. Covered a lot of my gaming needs from second hand shops.
A lot less VCDs and MP3s downloaded from FTP servers and BBSes.
Not sure if I’d bring it back, but I sure do miss the fun of playing Quake against my mates on public servers.
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.
Mp3 to cdda sounds like shit
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.
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.early ’00s*
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.
Having no filtering certainly had its pros and cons, considering how much traumatizing shit google would throw at me as a child lol
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.
*arrs auto downloading stuff for sure.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, I’ve been using newsgroups since the 90s back when I was also using xdcc on irc. Times were quite different.
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
deleted by creator
The whole political discussion about Internet media licensing, like a 10-15€ tax to finance artists while making piracy global. In the end we have the same except it’s financing Internet millionaires over artists
Is it weird that I don’t want to pay for any streaming media, I don’t have a cable package, but if some reasonable system were created such as that I could have access to digital copies of media for a flat monthly rate I would pay it?
Like if someone would come and just say you pay $80 a month and you can watch listen to or read anything you can find and save them all locally for future reuse, no problems, I would probably pony up.
Yes I’m also the same way with ads. I’d happily spend more for internet if there was somehow an “ad surcharge” that would mean I’d never see ads or be tracked. Let me pay whatever the advertisers pay.
I’d rather pay the same then use knowledge online to learn how to circumvent their bullshit. I will never pay companies to remove bullshit ‘features and items’ that make services inherently worse. It only enables them to continue molesting and raping you
Adblock exists, and as such, I never see ads. You could do the exact same, for the low low price of $0.
$40, yep, I’d do it. $80? Nope, I’d rather drop $2k on a new HDD array.
