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.
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.
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.
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.
yourpiratedmovie.exe
Thanks, Limewire!
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.
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.
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
One of the local secondary schools had a mailserver. No one knew or took security seriously in the mid-to-late nineties. As a result, it also hosted an ftp-server with widely shared credentials that held some 20GB worth of mp3s when it was shut down after three years in service. It was one of the biggest in the country at the time.
Irc and DCC-transfers were huge, too. As CD-writers became common place, a lot of it took place over snail mail or sneakernet. A guy at school had printed lists of all his tunes and took orders to burn them to music CDs.
I think the limited selection and limited transfers/storage made you cherish things more. Today you’ll never finish your library in your lifetime.
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.
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…
Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That’s the biggest change.
Ease of grabbing content. There are so many tools that make it too easy and automated. I mean this has changed drastically in the last 10 years let alone 90s.
*arrs auto downloading stuff for sure.
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
Yeah, I’ve been using newsgroups since the 90s back when I was also using xdcc on irc. Times were quite different.
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.
This is mid 00s but I’d bring back Oink. And my ratio
