Without seeds, torrents become almost useless, and many pirate sites offer rare and hard-to-find movies/animes whose torrent versions never download because their seeds are practically extinct forever. So I don’t think this is a weak complaint. If torrents didn’t have this weakness I would always choose to use them but…
The usenet has many treasures
Especially if you buy access via 2 providers on different backbones. Haven’t had a single failed/incomplete download since.
Usenet is awesome, but the fact that you have to pay for Usenet access defeats the main purpose of pirating for a lot of people.
Don’t get me wrong, it is super cheap(60$-100$/year?) and worth it to pay for Usenet from what I understand, but as a poor kid that discovered torrenting out of necessity, paying for Usenet back then would’ve been out of the question. I imagine most Gen Z kids feel the same about it at this point in their lives.
I scored a year of unlimited Usenet for 32 bucks
Zoomer here. The problem is really much worse than the meme suggests, and it isn’t really a generational gap at all.
The computer power user is a dying breed.
Today’s average computer user on windows, macos, or (heaven forbid) chromeos, knows nothing about software. They don’t even know what software is. They can’t install a program except through an app store. If you ask them which browser they use, they’ll probably say “google.” Furthermore, many perfectly functional people don’t use any computer except their phone.
The tendency toward user-friendly systems is fundamentally a good thing, in my opinion. It has advanced the democratisation of computing and its advantages. But on the flip side, it has left a huge swath of the general public totally reliant on systems they neither control nor understand in the slightest.
I use Arch, btw. I put my own computer together - I bought and assembled the hardware components, I performed a minimal, headless installation of my operating system, and I meticulously scripted every personalisation of my window manager (I use dwm).
To me, computing comes easily, as second nature. I used so many systems from such a young age that I simply intuit the design language of user interfaces, whether I’ve used them or not. To me, they seem painstakingly designed to make this easy. Yet, because of my computer literacy, I am often called upon as tech support for my family and friends, from zoomers to boomers, and most of them seem like helpless infants when it comes to technology.
This is because the average user doesn’t have to know or care what their system really does or how it really works. So, by the path of least resistance, a user learns the bare minimum to get what they want from their system. I’m not sure of anything that could change this reality.
As I said, it’s not a bad thing that most of the population can now access the advantages computing delivers. But I do see this state of affairs as brittle and concerning, where people depend utterly on software they don’t understand. This is often propriety software made by profit-driven corporations. The average user doesn’t know or care that they don’t actually control their software - because they don’t need to. They don’t know or care that their data is being tracked and sold, that their computer will update itself without permission or install programs they can’t vet, and that alternatives to this exist.
FR, younger generations don’t have to fix anything / solve any problems on their PC; any problem they’re likely to run into is an abstracted error within Google Docs, within their browser.
I was barely aware of the existence of pirate streaming services until they started cracking down on them. I torrent everything and run my own media server. (Millennial)
Older millennials absolutely terrified of the dianogas in Anoat City.
I’m in this picture and I appreciate it.
Need more disks…
All of 4 gen-x usenet users pictured
I think it’s more a generational gap in basic computer skills.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux. We understand computers (mostly) and the (various) paradigms they use.
Gen Z is what I refer to as the iPad generation (give or take a few years). Everything’s dumbed down and they never had to learn what a folder is or why you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search. (i.e. throw everything in a junk drawer and rummage through it as needed).
As with millennials who can’t balance a checkbook or do basic household tasks, I don’t blame us for not learning; I blame those who didn’t teach us. In this case, tech companies who keep dumbing everything down.
Born in late ‘80, I’m borderline. A Xennial, I guess.
Just yesterday I was groping on Mastodon that so much of Linux is done via the command line, which messes me up because I’ve only ever really used OSs with a GUI. Sure, we had a family C64, but my brother would load the games for me. Then we got a ‘proper’ Windows PC, where I stayed until I got my first Mac in ‘07.
I’m not unfamiliar with doing stuff in Terminal, but all I really do is follow instructions I find online.
Your analysis fits neatly into what the book Because Internet describes as different waves of “internet people”. First were geeks who went there before it was mainstream, second us millennials growing up as it is getting mainstream, alongside older folks forced to use it at work or voluntarily at home. Third wave are GenZ growing up when everything is easy already and, ironically, also even older folks now that it’s accessible for them.
Gen X: don’t quote the ancient piracy to me, Millennial. I was there for BBS and Napster.
I appreciate this measured take. Whenever generational differences get brought up, they oftentimes seemed framed as if generations are biologically different creatures or willfully choosing to be stupid in some sector. In all, or at least must cases, it’s what you suggest: people responding and developing based on what the environment has presented them.
Exactly. Basically nobody in their 30s can, say, drive a manual car without a synchro, unless they specifically practiced it, because there is zero need to learn that skill. And basically nobody under 20 can set port forwarding on a router because there is basically zero need for that skill.
When I wanted sound on Arkanoid, I HAD to learn IRQ settings, so I did. But now that stuff just works.
I thought this was going to be an American joke about automatics, but then realised that this is like when I explained to younger colleagues that I just drove my car home ‘crash gearbox style’ when the clutch failed, some were amazed that it was even possible. (Match the revs and feel the gear mesh) Edited to add: when I first tried linux on a pc with CRT monitor, to get a gui going I had to roll my own modeline. Bzzt, oh not that value, ctrl-c try another one. Such funsies
I had the same thing happen to me on my manual. Kinda cemented my love/fascination with manuals. Too bad my partner wanted an automatic :( … next time~
The first 24’ truck I learned in was a manual. Hated it but felt like a pimp shifting without the clutch.
I’m a zillenial that had a manual that blew its clutch while I was out and I had to relearn how to drive it back home, that was scaryfun. Where does that put me?
Adventurous young person, ready to be sent on a quest, is where you got filed in my head.
Sincerely,
~Lazy millenial wizard who wants help running errands.Flattered to be called young but I am definitely entering my own lazy era :)
Who owns a checkbook? I also didn’t need to learn cursive, or how to take care of a horse. If you want to learn something you will.
“Balance a checkbook” doesn’t have to mean a physical transaction log. It just means keeping track of expenditures and deposits so that you know the money in your account is sufficient to cover your purchases. You’d be surprised how many people my age can’t manage that. Also, at first, I read that as “Who owns a Chromebook?” lol.
Outside of using cursive for my signature, yeah, I’ve never used it in real life.
If you want to learn something you will.
True, but we learned computing because we had to.
You don’t learn to drive in a round about, or use the automatic checkout, or a thousand other things that have changed…
I mean depending on the country you almost certainly learnt to drive in a roundabout (quadrupley so if you were learning in Milton Keynes)
By the time I was born, checks weren’t in regular use here anymore. I’ve never seen one in real life. I’m 27
35 and I’ve used cheques 2x in my life
I’m also in my 30s and I’ve used a bit over a hundred checks. Mostly for paying rent.
As yet another 30-something year old I’ve never even seen a cheque. Is that a USA thing?
You probably do not know b/c reddthat has downvotes disabled, but people are downvoting your comment.
I find it the height of irony that your comment, which is relevant and contributes to the conversation, is receiving the “*I* personally do not like this idea” treatment.
A comment that aims to provide a more balanced perspective, to round out the discussion beyond “things should be the way that I am most comfortable with”, and offering not only logical facts but very relevant personal experience.
RedditLemmy can be so toxic sometimes. :-|I like the lack of downvotes, it’s nice. I get to focus on arguments being made. If someone wants to tell me they disagree, they’re going to have to actually tell me
Millenials grew up using BASIC on Windows 3?!
Millenials were teenagers possibly learning coding starting from 1995, the world was using C++ on Windows 95 at best.
This is part of why I, who am part of Gen Z, am actually really thankful that I didn’t get access to iPad until 9 (first gen, it might still be around here somewhere, kinda wonder if it’ll ever become a relic) and phone until 13, but did have access to a super old windows computer. It taught me how to install mods in Minecraft. It was astronomically difficult for me at that time with my limited understanding and all the fake green “Download here!” buttons that kept duping me and installing tons of bloatware and even malware onto the PC (yet another reason why AdBlock is a privacy and security concern, honestly deadass don’t let kids use a computer without it). But eventually I caught on and got good at identifying the scams from a young age and was able to teach other kids, and even eventually got into command stuff and writing my own mods. I memorized all of the block and item IDs before the flattening, but after that I was so disheartened that all my memorization was useless I kinda just stopped and never got really good at it. But still, just from that alone my computer knowledge was way ahead of other people’s around that time, and you might even say it set the foundation for my now linux-using open-source-contributing fediverse-loving self hahaha
Honestly I should have a bit of respect for zeds and alphas who grow up around locked black boxes and still despite that manage to come out the other side knowing how to use something like terminal or git.
I don’t know how many time I answered the same thing to the exact same argument but here goes:
In short, it’s most likely not true. You’re implying the the millennials were generally more competent but it’s very likely wrong, the vast majority of people in that gen had absolutely no clue what they were doing on a computer most of the time they just knew how to do a few limited things with them.
The apps didn’t make the masses tech illiterate, the app adjusted to the existing ones and removed the stuff they couldn’t never understand, like where to save a file to be able to find it later. (I’ve worked in a support call center and I can tell you with 98.5% accuracy that the lost file is in system32).
The gen-z has quite a lot of smart, curious tech savvy people, and a vast majority of tech-illiterate people, so did the millenial, and the X, and the boomers.
This whole generational superiority argument is just as baseless as it was when my gen was blaming yours for being lazy, not able to learn anything due to a short attention span and an obsession for brunch and avocado toast.
How do I delete this useless, obtuse, and inaccessible folder so I never lose my files again‽
Press and hold the Windows key, then tap the R. Let go of the windows key. Type cmd enter. Type format C:\ enter.
Sadly they “fixed” this.
(why not just type
format C:\ enterin the run dialog)
I actually hire engineers and I do notice that the zoomers seem to have less general computing and IT skills, though I think some of that has to do with how the curriculum has changed. Software engineering and CS is just way more specialized than it used to be and isn’t just a slow evolution from computer engineering these days. So you don’t get that broad computing background which starts with electrodynamics and works up through digital design, comms, networking, and ultimately software.
For my purposes, this knowledge is a big part of what differentiates a developer from an engineer (and proper computer science is a different thing entirely) which has made it really difficult to figure out what to expect from a software engineering degree.
I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. Relying on edge cases in either generation is pointless. Millenials had zero tech support to help them for everything you need to do on computers.
How to load a program: Nowadays - touch the icon on the screen. Millenials - Load"$“,8 LIST LOAD"LEISURESUIT*”,8,1 (wait 10 min.) RUN
How to install a game: Nowadays - Click BUY on game store and choose INSTALL. Millenials - Learn MSDOS basics, Type a series of 5 commands without typos
How to configure game settings: Nowadays - Play with volume sliders, Graphics preferences, and game difficulty. Millenials - Edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to ensure device drivers are loaded, load game, assign proper IRQ, DMA variables to get your SOUNDBLASTER card to play sound, select game difficulty
How to setup a printer: Nowadays - go to manufacturers website and download drivers, run setup.exe, plug in printer to USB port. Millenials - Check Device manager in Windows to determine COM port and other relevant variables. Set values in word processing software. Employ Minor in mechanical engineering to align or correct bad ink ribbon with perforated track runners. Repeat fixes every 5 pages ad nauseum.
All that BS and more required hours of research to learn how to do in an era where guidance was buried in some sketchy newsgroup where ‘Rick Rolling’ was seeing if you’d notice “Deltree c:” in the instructions, and not just a simple 20 second video on TikTok.
I work with children using Ipads and that one kid who doesn’t get lost if the relevant icon is missing in the UI is the one I know is going to be trouble. They say average IQ increases by 3 every generation and this is the first one I don’t think that trend will hold for because they aren’t required to think at all ever.
Having to search out codecs even, that was a big thing back in the day. My entire school was passing around videos on floppies an cds and learning about codecs to play the Pamela Anderson tape it seemed like. Years after it was on vhs I think
Personally, I think both of these perspectives have truth to them but neither is the whole story.
True, there are tech savvy people in every generation, and the majority of each generation isn’t necessarily tech savvy.
But it’s also true that the tech savvy people today are growing up in a world where technology has been obfuscated and simplified whereas formerly tech savvy people didn’t have a choice but to learn the ropes to be involved at all, which meant there was more need for Millennial tech savvy people to understand the basics, while there is no such equivalent need for Gen Z.
I agree, I think many are overselling the impact of that, but it has an impact nonetheless, however small.
I know this is true or I wouldn’t have such trouble explaining to crypto (specifically NFT) enthusiasts why counting bits matters and how there is limited “space” inside an NFT for nothing but a simple URL. If you grew up in the 80’s or 90’s and were learning ANY amount of networking, counting bits for subnets in IPv4 was pretty much a requirement. Now a lot of networking is obfuscated and automated with IPv6, which is finally coming into its own, and a side effect is that understanding these limitations of the technology has flown out the window for buzzwords like “smart contracts.”
You make the same mistake as the previous person. You take the exemple of the minority of people who cared to try to understand how computer worked and generalize it to the entire gen.
I have thousands of people in my office that prove everyday that millenial are for the most part tech illiterate and do not care about how thing works. I’ve seen the millenial arrive in the work env and the gen-z and there is absolutely no difference. Millenial were exactly as dumb (or as smart). If anything, I think gen-z are actually smarter because they come in not believing the corporate bullshit the X and the Y drank like cool-aid. But that’s another topic.
In any case, all the stuff we had to go through didn’t make us smarter, for every 10,000 of people of my gen who learned they had to edit autoexec.bat to launch a game, I’d bet that barely one knew what the heck himem.sys actually was. That didn’t make them smarter, just monkeys who learned a trick.
So yeah, geeky gen-Z don’t need to tweak as many parameters, they can directly launch fusion 360 and start designing parts for their 3D printers. Tech has moved on. Gen-Z geeks fiddle with other stuff than shitty windows drivers.
I think your first paragraph only applies to US or US-like countries. I learned how to navigate unregulated Internet to download most things I could fit, and then expanded into more technical knowledge as I grew up. I know of the things you said in your first paragraph now, but I did not grow up beside them to have learned what I know today, or even what I knew back then. These computers were expensive (for us?) at first, so very few people had them, and then a few years later they were more abundant and easier for us to even have a chance to learn about them.
you should organize documents into them instead of throwing them all in “Documents” library and just using search.
nobody look at my downloads folder. It’s fine. I promise.
Datahoarder checking in:
Never delete 🫡
Organizing my downloads has been on my to do list for… Four, I think? Yeah, four… phones…
Zettelkasten users:
I’ve been interested in Zettelkasten for a few years, since I discovered Obsidian, but I’ve never been able to quite get the hang of it enough to make it stick
Obsidian user as well. I like to think of it that tags are folders.
When you put something in a folder, you have to choose one of the files identities. Tags more or less allow you to assign a file to any number of groups.
So if you’re writing about an NPC in a DnD campaign, for example: That NPC will exist in a certain place. He will be associated with particular guilds and he will have certain moves that you might want to keep track of. You can later easily search by a guild or a move or a place and there will be a link to that NPC and others that share those indentifying characteristics.
A big advantage of zettelkasten is that you don’t need to really worry about file management in the sense of needing to make exclusionary choices.
You say that like other generations don’t also just save everything to the desktop.
It’s not about generations at all. Some people who grew up with early computers may have used them but never really “got it”.
Millennials grew up alongside modern computing (meaning the two matured together). We dealt with everything from BASIC on a C64 to DOS and then through Windows 3 through current. We also grew up alongside Linux
Only the oldest millenials did. When the youngest were born, the internet and Windows 95 were readily available and they were in middle school when the iPhone came out.
Yea, I’m a millenial, and I remember mostly only interacting with old Macintosh LCs in elementary school, and then Windows 95 and up after that. My uncle had an old Tandy computer running DOS, that I remember at least learning how to run a game on, but by the time I was interacting with a computer, regularly, Windows 95 and AOL were the most common thing.
We did have some DOS games on CD during the Windows 95/98 era, though. Lemmings always ran better if you dropped down to DOS and ran it from there instead of trying to run it through Windows, for instance.
Almost like the education system was meant as a long term investment to turn out a profit instead of “education”
Trouble is that there are enough millennials who also have absolutely no clue about computers. Between dude-bros who won’t touch that nerd shit and girls who got told by their nerd boyfriend’s that the computer will start to burn if they click anything besides their allowed icons a vast majority of people are glad if they know how to turn on the computer and print out their document.
Yes, there are probably a lot more computer literate millennials than in other generations. But even there it pretty much depends on family and friends. And in a pirate community on Lemmy most of the people will belong to the tech savvy bubble.
In our friend group even the most computer illiterate kid knew how to set up a LAN without a DHCP server. Their younger siblings had no idea a LAN was even a thing.
My wife’s ex always told her that she couldn’t understand how to work with a computer. Her older brother who works in IT wouldn’t explain anything to her either. They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
They were pretty astonished when they heard that she had installed a GPU by herself (which most people here know is trivial). Which gave her enough confidence to fix her VCR by herself.
Anyone can learn any skill if they actually invest the time.
And regarding the older brother, you learn pretty quickly working help desk that users generally don’t care what the problem is or why it happened. They just want to get back to work and not have it happen again. After a while you get conditioned to just be friendly and solve the issue without explaining what you’re doing or why.
I seen teens without being able to make a folder in windows because they only use phones, so.
many such cases.
There’s torrent clients on Android. You don’t need a computer
Torrenting on Android does exist, but it’s such a battery suck that seeding is unsustainable unless your mobile device is plugged in all the time. Which makes it not-so-mobile.
And then there’s mobile plan data limits.
I truly hate that phones don’t readily have file browsers and folders, and when you do add them, they aren’t effective. Mostly that would be useful when moving files between phone and computer. It’s not simple even to get the computer to mount the phone’s drive, probably because everyone is fine with having all their files “in the cloud.”
Super annoying because all the earlier smart phones did have all that, even early Android. The OSes just keep getting more dumbed down and locked down to the point that I went from a phone enthusiast to despising all smart phones.
Not only that but the physical phones themselves are dumping features while charging the same or often increased prices…
My current phones literally being held together with tape but wanting a current phone with an SD card and headphone jack has seriously limited my options.
I am right there with you. My Pixel 4a is still going, but there doesn’t appear to much anything on the market to replace it that doesn’t have a boatload of caveats.
The switch from using shit like Napster/LimeWire/eDonkey/etc to BitTorrent was fairly easy. It was the lack of the torrent app itself not having a file search in it that made things feel like they went backwards.
Before Napster and the rest, you’d do a web search for “warez” and sift through shady sites to find a working download link. After Napster, you’d just search for what you want in the app. I know there are torrent apps that do this now, but I don’t know how wide of a reach they actually have. I still just go to a tracker’s website and find things to magnet link.
eDonkey was an easy way to share something with a group of friends via P2P!
Gen X here. I still use my eMule client! Because you just share whole directory structures, it’s great for finding and sharing older obscure stuff.
Boy, I remember how desperate all of Germany was when kino.to went down. It took at least a week until everyone found an alternative!
It took at least a week until everyone found an alternative!
Cruel and Unusual punishment
It was the goto streaming site back then. We all learned out lesson once it was down. I looked it up and it was online from 2008 to 2011, feels longer for me but I was torrenting alot before that. German law is strict on torrenting so streaming is the way to go here.
VPN with proper config don’t cut it?
I heard german law being clown but they still have to prove the “crime”
Some people just stick to the ez pz apps and don’t care about their privacy or to understand what they’re working with. With modern phones and pc’s that treat people like toddlers, a lot of people don’t develop skills further than that
As part of Gen Z I do not approve this message. When I was young I would stream movies from stream sites (to be fair I had no money to have VPN to torrent etc) but I have not visited one of those for like 5 years now since I learned more. Now not all gen Z is tech smart I see it in my friends and family members close to me age who are… Dumb and worse they don’t care to get better and think it’s fine and that is what the problem is imo.
i don’t get this ‘generation gap’ thing. There are also Milennials who are just as clueless.
You can always dive into the whole private tracker, sonarr/radarr + media server setup if you want superior quality or just to host your own files. But if you are happy with what streaming sites/apps provide that is fine too.
I for one am glad that piracy is easily accessible by anyone who has access to the internet.
Honestly as a German, torrenting seems to be way too risky. Internet providers will immediately cave when they are contacted about an IP adress they control and there are multiple law firms whose only business model seems to be sending out c&d letters.
Do you not have a VPN?
In Canada, they can send those letters but not much else.
In Germany, those letters come with a fine, which they can sue you over, if you don’t pay.
Yikes :( that’s brutal. You could use a seedbox and encryption? I think that would mostly circumvent that issue. If storing it locally isn’t a concern, then just hosting it on the seedbox and connecting services like Plex to it works as well.
Hats off for our poor German friends. It’s definitely not easy over there, but if you do the private torrent tracker + VPN combo, you can be relatively safe.
Rightsholders have seeders sitting in public torrents to grab IPs to sue about. Private trackers are essentially a “club” that only invites known users, (friends of friends) and as such, fewer (not zero) rightsholders are able to join, and as such, fewer instances of being referred to a lawfirm simply because there isn’t anyone in the swarm who is a rightsholder who only wants your IP… because they don’t invite those kind of people most of the time.
Rightsholders like how hanging fruit like public torrents. Private trackers help take a lot of the stress away.
However, I don’t know how it works in Germany so maybe rightsholders over there are more zealous.
VPN?
Regardless of whether or not this is true, memes from an older generation saying they’re better than the younger generation are ALWAYS cringe
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 1900s…
FTFY
EDIT:
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
I currently have 130+ tabs open in Firefox and 90+ in Chrome in addition to some other programs open and running (libreOffice, vpn, and others) Everything is working fine on my old laptop with an i5 processor and 16G ram and windows 10, ssd hd
I can’t really game on this, and trying to run a virtual machine is a slog.
But VS Code, database, xshell, calibre, audacity, photopea, even basic video editing all run fine. Granted I usually do one project at a time, so I’m not using VS Code and editing videos at the same time.
The browser tabs are usually always open. Oh, and I actually just cleaned up my tabs. There were a lot more…
I feel like the memory issues are mostly worked out now for most of us.
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
It’s not true currently. Firefox and Chrome trade blows on which is more performance and which uses more/less RAM these days. It varies, but they’re quite close.
When tested with 10 tabs open, Firefox occupied about 960MB of memory, which is only slightly less than Chrome.
For awhile Firefox’s JavaScript engine used more memory, but those gaps have been mostly filled.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
Just call it an “app,” that’ll shut 'em up.
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Brave does I think. I didn’t allow it to do so the one time I saw the pop up and I would not want that to happen unless I was always behind a VPN.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don’t know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
Opera had torrent support at the time I stopped using it, I never heard they had discontinued that feature but I’m assuming they did, both because it probably would have been mentioned in this comment chain already and also because making that decision should have been inevitable. I never used bittorrent before joining oink, I think I remember on joining thinking I would just use opera and then installing utorrent after finding out client whitelisting was a thing. Maybe I was already on oink when opera added the feature and I thought I’d try it because I was already using opera. Maybe this is all a fever dream, who can really say.
I think pocket and quite the slew of unrelated features disagrees with you. Seems like most browsers are happy to be the everything app.
I’m sure they probably could but they don’t really have the incentive to add support for them.
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
I am sure you still have same number of those more advanced users, but now far more people have access to computers because they are cheaper and easier to use. That may be about it.
In the feature if you want a semblance of privacy, you will need to get fluent in Linux imho
Your chocie folks.
As for piracy, it ain’t rocket science, once economic necessity kicks in, they will figure it out. That’s the beauty of not having money
