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.
Cause search engines simply showed websites that contained your search terms, without filtering and AI algorithms.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
early ’00s*
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.
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
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.
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.
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
I used to pirate games because there was no legal digital distribution. The pirate version I could get faster and wouldn’t hassle me to put the right disk in the drive before I could play.
Then digital distribution got good, DRM got less obnoxious, and malware got meaner.
I used to pirate music for similar reasons.
I didn’t pirate video because the files were too large, and around the time bandwidth caught up, Netflix got good. Now digital video distribution is awful so I pirate video until they solve the fractured storefront problem.
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!
Who else downloaded LimeWire Pro using LimeWire?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :-)
Memory unlocked.
I definitely know what you’re talking about (dispite not remembering the name of it) but they had everything. And if they didn’t, you could request it and they’d find it.
I miss that site now
Allofmp3?
Yes!
Holy cow haha. I “bought” so much music there. They got a ton of obscure gypsy brass band stuff for me when I asked too (Fanfare Ciocarlia)
Yeah that’s the one. I got so much music from that site.
