The simplicity of a lot of things, such as search engines giving you workable links, torrent pages didn’t have 11 buttons that said download. Even malware was innocent and you could avoid getting into trouble by avoiding Linkin-park_Hybrid-theory.exe
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.
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.
Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down.
Do you think that has to do with popularity though or a shifting attitude towards piracy?
I feel like there’s a lot of people who treat it like they would with streaming. Downloading the newest episode or season of a show and deleting it almost immediately. They don’t feel the need to store it for later.
People do keep stuff might be limited by their storage. A 1TB portable HDD can be great but if you are downloading entire shows it can devour it pretty quickly.
Either way I feel like a lot of people aren’t concerned about quality. They care about having immediate access to it.
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.
Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That’s the biggest change.
omg, speed, why has no one said ‘speed’ yet? An hour-long tv show was 350mb, and it took three days to download.
Agreed. I can now download a multi-terabyte file in a matter of minutes or even less.
Wow multi-terabyte in minutes! There are not many ISPs delivering 100Gbps and even fewer are delivering 1000Gbps.
Unless you live on top of a data center.
Whoops typing while walking through a lobby and obviously had a brain bork. My mistake. GB.
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.
Private trackers.
Cinemageddon, for example, has lots of seeds on almost any worthless shitty B-movie you can think of going back to the early days of film.
Source: 16 years on CG
I can never get a CG invite, personally, I’ve basically given up except for that offer in my bio to eternally curse your enemies for one (still standing btw).
Unfortunately they never do sign ups, open or interviewed, and even if they did interview I’m only on IPT, which nobody takes as proof lmao. I mostly use usenet these days unfortunately, but at least it does have it’s benefits, DrunkenSlug accts are easier to come by and it is faster, and they have many things, but unfortunately lack B movies and other stuff I’m really into, but at least there’s IPT, slsk, yt-dl and internetarchive for some of those.
Internet archive may not be around much longer so grab what you can.
I know, I’m not happy about that.
It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.
I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.
FiOp
Faith in Older People?
https://www.faithinolderpeople.org.uk/my guess: FiberOptic cable
that makes way more sense, thank you
I remember downloading the big stuff at work, because they had a T1, and network security wasn’t really a thing yet.
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.
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.
Closing Time is no longer by Green Day
Every comedy song was by weird al
Primus had its own genre tag
I KNOW WHOOOO I WANT TO TAKE ME HOME
Downloading a movie only to find out it was actually porn.
Or the other way around.
Downloading a movie only to find it was the pain Olympics or a cartel/terrorist beheading was also fun
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.
Mp3 to cdda sounds like shit
mp3 to cdda sounds exactly like the mp3. It’s a wav file. Pretty much the unmodified output of the mp3 decoder.
yourpiratedmovie.exe
Thanks, Limewire!
Who else downloaded LimeWire Pro using LimeWire?
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.