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People who pirated in the late 90s and early 00s what is the most dramatic change from then till now? And if you had the power what would you bring back?
I really miss the original Napster. I got so many good songs off of there. Now I really don’t know where to find new music that I’m going to like. I feel like I’ve listed to most of the stuff out there (even though I know that’s impossible), or it’s just not a unique sound. Everything just seems to blend together even on a “discovery” mix seeded with artists I don’t listen to much.
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.
You can get an entire album or discography now. Back then I remember getting random loose mp3s of artists I was interested in, dictated by how many seeds happened to be online. Not sure I would bring that back, but it did make for some deep cuts becoming my favourite songs and not just the well known “hits” from albums.
The most dramatic change is probably how easy it is to hear any of that music in a legit way, and hear it instantly.
How much easier it’s gotten and most of what you download nowadays is exactly what you’re looking for. In the 90’s/00’s, alot of what was pirated had the potential to just be total BS or mislabeled, so you were never entirely certain what it was you were getting. I think Madonna had even gotten into it and released a one of her own albums as a fake download with her telling the listener “What the fuck are you doing?” At the time I mostly got music, though the Dreamcast pirating scene was pretty big for me for awhile. I think anymore though I’m probably more interested in obscure RPG books now.
I think with torrenting, there’s a certain amount of trust that’s inherent with some torrents by virtue of the number of downloads/seeders there are on a torrent. At least for me, I can assume, ok, there’s 100 people seeding this thing, chances are this is exactly what it says it is, otherwise this many people wouldn’t be still seeding it (you can fool some people some of the time, or something like that). I don’t pirate nearly as often as I did when I was younger, but now I feel the need to use protection (via a VPN) because you just don’t know who might be watching. In my entire time having pirated stuff over multiple decades, I had only ever gotten a single letter from my ISP, so it’s not something that I ever felt particularly afraid of, but you never know and it’s better to be safe about that stuff.
We torrented so many movies, so so many movies. It quit being a question of what we wanted to watch and just became a game of how much can I get today. Then I just wandered away from it one day. I never received any letters. I do have a friend who got a letter from Lucas.
Usenet Newsgroups were a big part of my life back then. Games, MP3s, Software, Movies, TV shows. So many Xbox games that I burned to DVD and loaded onto my modded Xbox. Those were the days. Now I only torrent some movies and TV shows thru a VPN and pay for everything else. My time is worth a lot more to me now than back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
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.
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.