I don’t think the facts match the claim, but I completely agree with the sentiment.
For years, the ‘legit’ consumer has had to deal with ad interruptions and bad UI and service disruptions and having media removed from their library. Something that pirates don’t even have to think about. The music revolution that Jobs and Apple created with iTunes, which allowed people to just buy music and just own it and just use it however they want (no DRM) with an ease that made piracy look difficult and seem too risky to bother, never came for TV or movies or books or any other media category.
And now the streaming revolution has all but undone that progress as well. You don’t own anything, a company decides when you have or lose access to something, and even if you pay money for access you are still advertised to and your data is still sold off.
I remember iTunes only letting you change computer like 2-3 times max before the drm would make mysic not work any more, but maybe it was no-drm in the beginning.
I had a chinese 1GB shuffle though so IDK if that’s correct.
The chinese shuffle also doubled up as a usb key (very useful back then) and also didn’t need iTunes to function smh.
Yeah IIRC you’re right, though I remember you could contact apple and reset it.
It was called FairPlay DRM and they only really got rid of it around a decade after iTunes launched. I’m not 100% but I think I had to pay to upgrade my already paid-for library to DRM free too
It may have originally had DRM but it doesn’t now.
That didn’t last very long.
But then later for like $10 I could take all my pirate music, legitimize it, and download a copy from iTunes if theirs was better quality. That was nice.
Edit: iTunes Match
Yeah this guy is on some Apple fanboy shit if he thinks iTunes was drm free. Their shitty design for iTunes and decision to force you to use it despite it making the experience of listening to music much worse is the primary reason an ipod is the only Apple device I’ve ever owned. Freedom of choice and Apple have never mixed. That’s such a weird angle to take when describing them.
So they only forced everyone into their ecosystem for seven years and once they cornered their market they gave back the illusion of choice? That’s cool I guess but that’s explicitly the opposite of what I mean when I say freedom of choice, open source, DRM free, etc.
I’m not defending Apple. Just stating that at one time iTunes was DRM free.
Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.
Ads you say?
I’ll have to take your word for it…
I feel like most of the kind of people who go out of their way to pirate also go out of their way to avoid ads.
Had this bite me once growing up. Forgot to get an ad block on my friends PC and ended up blasting porn ads on the family PC.
Never raw dog the net like that…
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
It causes genuine harm, I’m visually impaired and I’ve wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and “road work ahead” signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don’t know what’s official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it’s colours look important, nope, it’s an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it’s probably the same ad… Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be and I’m in danger.
I’m also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn’t as bad, but anyone who’s hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It’s the exact same for visual impairment.
Once ads are allowed into a platform they will ultimately be what destroys it eventually.
Might take a week or a decade. But the lust of that easy ad money will ruin the thing they were put there to fund in the end.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true - maybe it depends on (a) the owners of the platform and/or (b) whether there are sources of funding besides advertising
E.g. here in the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 are both broadcasters owned by the government, and both are funded at least in part by adverts. But I think both of them are relatively healthy and aren’t on the brink of destroying themselves.
I think most of the BBC’s funding comes from the licence fee (British people pay for a TV licence) but they make some money from ads shown to international audiences. Channel 4 is solely funded by adverts I think, but it’s owned by the government and I think they have to abide by certain rules and targets.
In the UK the BBC only has advertisements for its own content, nothing else. As bad as its got since Tony Blair and David Cameron both undermined its independence and quality, at least there are no ad breaks in its shows.
True, they don’t show commercial adverts in the UK, but they do to other countries. People outside the UK can access the BBC website but they’ll see adverts on there, and apparently BBC America (shown in the US) has commercial adverts
And Channel 4 of course does show commercial adverts in the UK, but I think they still make some decent content, and I don’t think they’re on the verge of self-destruction
Maybe the real problem is when an entity is chasing profits, because Channel 4 isn’t a normal for-profit business, since they’re owned by the government, and I think they have to abide by some rules
Well the distinction here is that TV license paying citizens of the UK don’t get the ads.
But then you could look at Channel 4, which does show ads to UK people, but I think Channel 4 is still okay and I don’t think it has been ruined by ads. So maybe a profit motive is what causes enshittification, rather than just ads. I definitely hate ads but maybe ads alone don’t destroy platforms.
You won’t get any disagreement from me on the corrosive effects of advertising.
I do think that Channel 4 used to regularly produce greater content than it can now. But that probably is more to do with advertising revenue being leeched away to online platforms and the growth of its direct competitors.
Interesting, maybe the content has changed, I probably don’t watch enough TV to have noticed. But I think Channel 4 news is pretty good, and I liked their Paralympics coverage.
Panics while using Boost to view this post
Depends on the piracy site. If you go to some of the pirate streaming sites or the blogs that host tons of pirated software with 30 rapidgator links that die after a month (instead of just using a torrent like a normal sensible person trying to share a 2-30+gb file that is begging to be taken down) without Adblock it’s absolutely comical how many ads there are. Even with Adblock those are the sites that manage to still have ads because they’re on the cutting edge of sketchy shit. It’s like seeing a late 90s to early 2000s website with how much random bullshit is pasted everywhere
Despite that I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
You even get to pay more and more for this privilege…smh
This is all spanish (as in castilian) media. The torrents are sparse and usually really badly encoded, I’m talking stuff like AVI codec in media produced in 2024.
There’s a better chance if you try to find it in the open with those sketchy links you mention or you are “lucky enough” to get invited to a Telegram group that has it uploaded to the platform, severed in hundreds of multipart files.
I’ve seen more Spanish people using the outdated Ed2K protocol through a/eMule rather than torrents even, it’s so depressing.
And yet I see 0 ads in either of those sites.
There are in the videos as sponsors for a lot of channels on YouTube, and as sponsored results on Amazon
Tbh I don’t care about the sponsor segments in videos. It’s actually my favorite way of advertising, as I can skip it or watch the funny ones (tomska does really funny - although slightly incorrect - segments).
But boy do I hate sponsored results on Amazon or similar platforms. I feel like I have to search through them to get to the actual products, and then I can’t trust the reviews
Of all the ads being pushed on us, this type seems like the least egregious to me.
Corporations like google and amazon damage the market and the industry more than “piracy” does
I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable
Brand awareness gets you subconsciously
Here’s a really horrifying fact about ads, they don’t expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can’t trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.
After Amazon said there’d be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It’s finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson’s Farm and donating to farmers. That’s the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
Somehow “legit” sites won’t try to install malware on my laptop. So, I take more regular ads over piracy crap.
You’ve never seen a DNS poisoning attack have ya? I’ve seen Google infect systems just because they looked up a particular football game, because some bad actor somehow poisoned the DNS cache.
So no, “legit” sites aren’t always safe either.
I know what dns poisoning is but it usually happens on so called legit sites. Pirate sites serve you malware out of the box.
If you would stop clicking on the ‘hot, horny single women in your area’ banners you wouldn’t have to worry about it
There is this torrent site I use that likes to use javascript to redirect to various malicious websites on every single click. After reaching the desired amount of clicks, it start behaving like a normal, “legit” website. Just of out curiosity I checked few other torrent websites and got the same result. It got so annoying that I’m using radarr and sonarr to look for torrents.
Sounds more like sharehoster behavior to me. Btw, i get that for (legit) Sims 4 mods too.
Hey everybody, this guy uses a shitty fucking site and thinks all piracy sites are bad! Definitely not confirmation bias with a tinge of ignorance
I remember my first time on the internet
Edit: Ublock Origin, Sponsorblock, Violent Monkey with anti script and ad block blocker scripts. Countdown bypass, autoclick skip ad and shortlink scripts, and what ever other specific scripts for your needs
I decided to be helpful for others instead of just a smart ass. Not you OP, you have it coming for spreading misinformation
Ah no, most “malware” is just false positive of AV software, since repacked games look pretty similiar. And no such dangers with media files, as long as your system is uptodate.
Wasn’t there statistics a while ago already, that most malware comes from “legit” sites, especially newspapers (malvertising), by quite a margin? Hard to find now, too much noise.
Not to say you don’t need to be careful. But not much more than always with executing something from the internet.
One rule of thumb: torrent sites usually have a colorful pirate skull things for torrents from reputable groups (if not, look for a better site). They have a reputation to lose if malware gets slipped in. And they do what they do mostly for reputation and competition.
Edit: found this, SO had maintenance today.
