Asklemmy

What about those of us who pirated in the early '80s?

The computer lab at my junior high was basically one big floppy copying/trading center. It was great.

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.

How much easier it's gotten and most of what you download nowadays is usually 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.

One thing I truly miss from the Winamp days of piracy was the live feeds. Anime, porn, music, some great adventures discovered from just browsing. It's how I discovered Deftones, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Sindee Coxx.

Maybe 2010s but there was this program called Sopcast. It would stream live sports in HD through P2P and it worked amazingly! Don't know what happened to that but now it's just shitty sites filled with ads.

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.

Having to wait a day or more to download something. Today you can download a movie in seconds.

This is mid 00s but I'd bring back Oink. And my ratio

Many people work from home and don't have very many Internet providers in their area. In a post COVID world, many people are never getting a job in an office. They can't risk losing their job over losing Internet access over piracy.