In the aughts, pirates bay felt like the library of Congress. If a single commenter on a B tier forum saw it in a guy’s basement in the mid 80’s there was a sure bet at least 3 people were seeding it and one of them had great upload. If it wasn’t there, you had a dozen different sites with their own dedicated fans posting everything you could ever want.
Now it’s maybe 6 sites, they all have the exact same listings, and the only things with seeds came out in the last year of two. It’s like seeing your local library after a fire.
People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn’t any where close to that. Probably hasn’t been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don’t seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.
In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you’re left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.
Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.
What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that’s what librarians do.
If I had the power I’d take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.
This. TPB was almost a trust worthy site in 2010’s. They had ads for penis enlargement and domains changed constantly, but it was so easy to find everything there. Now it’s hard to find a mirror that will let you click a magnet link and most of the time the torrents are dead.
Sounds like you should get involved with PTs, they’d be right up your alley. The spirit is alive and well.
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.
yourpiratedmovie.exe
Thanks, Limewire!
There was this Russian website where you could download whole albums for like 50 cents. I absolutely loved it, because as well as current hits it also had the most obscure, crazy stuff, classical music, jazz, and world music. I think they’re all in prison now, the guys who ran it.
There were a handful of them. Two I remember are allofmp3 and something like mp3eagle. One of those introduced me to Muse around the time Black holes and Revelations came out.
Allofmp3, that was it! I downloaded the Muse albums too. :-)
I miss my hard drive full of music. Sure some of it was mislabeled, but at least I didn’t have to deal with ads.
Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.
Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.
Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.
Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I
t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.
Late 80s early 90s there were literal adverts in the classified section of the paper by pirates where you could buy 100s of games for a set sum (very cheap usually). Often you mailed empty disks to them and the money, and they would return it with games. They would also have monthly printed newsletters about new titles.
Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.
Usenet was awesome. A distributed, decentralized network, with thousands of forums. Until it got taken over by spam and porn and a lack of moderation.
Now we have Lemmy. Let’s not mess it up.
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
I remember that my brother acquired the full collection of every single song which had ever been on the top 20 list of songs for a national newspaper. It dated all the way back to the 60’s, which is ancient for my brother and I, both born around the early 90s. I never got close to listening to the full thing, but it was awesome to have a collection of songs which basically no one knew existed and be able to choose a random year and pick a popular song from then to listen to.
You could do pretty much the same thing now, but the fact that it’s so easily available and accesible kills a lot of the magic.
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.
I used to pirate because I was poor back then. Now that I make a decent living I’m more than happy to pay devs for their hard work.
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.
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…
[off topic]
I remember the golden age of the DVD Man. That noble soul who had all the latest movies on DVD a day after they opened. Quality ranged from someone recording the movie in the theater with a camcorder to perfect copies taken directly from the source.
I miss mixed CDs. You meet someone, you understand their music tastes, and you make them a mix of stuff that you think they’d like, but from your favorite known artists. I made plenty, and ones I received got me into some awesome bands.
