2007… that guy was late to the game. And before this we had burned CDs and Zip Drives
I’m doing my part 🫡
lol 2007.
Definitely my reaction lol try 2001
Hell, we were on Napster in 99.
Usenet early/mid 90’s. A huge stack of floppy disks and a few weeks of all night downloads so dad didn’t lose his shit over the telephone screaming at him.
I miss that most of all
Dling metallica…
Bootlegs in the 80s
Yeah I think I was using Morpheus then Kazaa…2000/2001?
These fucking dumbass kids. Whyyyyy won’t they just open up a book-shaped website and read the actual history?
Of course I say that in a country that literally forgot what happened just four years ago so…nvmd, back to “human race deserves itself” mode.
Gentle reminder that i2p exists where torrents can be downloaded anonymously.
I2p is great , definitely the future
Yeah except nobody fucking lets you join lol
Join i2p? What do you mean?
Private torrents is what I was talking about. Starting to wonder if I responded to the wrong comment need to review the thread now lol
I’m just as confused as you are
so right, I can’t believe how right you are
First rule of usenet. Dont talk about usenet
Good point, fixed
Dude private torrent groups on Usenet are shutting their doors to outsiders everywhere and building motes lmao where have you been. If you don’t know someone really well it’s almost impossible to join one. The two I’m in say no to newbies constantly.
deleted by creator
Could you try explaining your experience instead of being an insufferable, patronizing ass? Or is that too much to ask?
Why be so combative?
Anon: 2007
The music industry ca. 1981:
So we left side b blank so you can help!
Also the book piracy that existed in universities through photocopying and sharing pages.
This is making a comeback with scanning.
Amazon was the place to buy manuals(art,hobby, do it yourself etc.). Now authors have pulled their books from print and expecting people to sign a subscription on patreon. Now there are sharks overpricing any remaining physical print second hand by 2000%.
pirates have scanned these books and selling access to uploaded jpgs for a fraction of what the manual would have cost had it just stayed in print.
Kinda inverts inverted the causality of Netflix starting their own production and other companies pulling their licences. Netflix started their own production to survive the licences getting pulled, which was inevitable as soon as Netflix looked profitable.
They didn’t get greedy, they probably started out greedy, ran a good service to grab market share, then had to make moves to defend against the predictable greed of the incumbents.
It’s greedy turtles all the way down
This is basically it except the trick was Netflix wasn’t actually all that profitable based strictly off of customers to start. It was a long con. It was ostensibly funded by people placing a bet. They offered a service that wasn’t just disruptive, it was operating at a loss. People piled into the service so licences started to get dicey. Netflix started producing and filming, initially at independent rates amd sweetheart deals in my union territory because everybody looked at as being a little baby studio that needed nurturing and to be fair working a Netflix show back when it started had perks. They placed bets on creators who wanted to make something different. Not nessisarily great but different giving their production teams a lot of creative freedom. Paid lunches, cell allowance, sometimes better hours and crew gifts when a number of studios like Disney were pulling penny pinching bullshit and trying to pretend they were an independent studio to get lower rates while letting their producers act like skeeze.
Thing was it was a cuckoo all along.
They flushed the market with a business model sustained by outside money so everybody else started doing the same thing. It destroyed all the union and contract protections syndicated television once had particularly erasing residuals. That was the main thing. Creators used to make money off of the amalgamation of their lifetime work by being owed a small amount everytime a rerun was aired… But streaming didn’t do that. They had those sweetheart deals that made streaming services exempt from on demand access counting as replays. So you cut off the career curve of creators from building security and only paid them for stuff they made once turning them effectively gig worker.
Once everyone was playing by the same rules the funding at the top cut out because they got what they wanted out of it they started jacking prices, removing titles, selling advertising because what the hell were you going to do, go back to cable? Now the boom is over and our local Industry is a bloody dust bowl. My seniority has jumped up more in the past year than it has in the full ten years before as folk have been retiring or dropping from the union to find new careers.
2007 ? Everybody around me was pirating every single piece of media in 2000 and we were late to the party
Napster was a household name and made mp3 piracy mainstream in 1999!
The golden days of the net 🥲
People were pirating games over bbs in the 80s. I have a shoebox of 5.25" floppies for the commodore 64 with hand written labels.
Don’t copy that floppy
Take that 3.5 floppy you got in the mail and break the tab so that you could read / write.
Doom and Wolf3d for my buddies. Rise of the Triad.
I really wish I was a consultant for these fucking jokers.
Back when Disney+ was just “Rumor has it Disney wants to launch their own Netflix-like streaming service.”, I called this shit. I said “Well that’s just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart, no one’s going to juggle 50 different streaming services just to be able to find something to watch.”
And I was fucking right.
The only ethical streaming service is Tubi as it doesn’t charge relying on ads alone, and it’s a neat little bonus that Tubi has actively aided in the restoration of lost media.
If it aint on Tubi, then I’m going to yo-ho-ho with a bottle of fuck you.
just going to cause this whole thing to fall apart
Disney Plus generated $8.4 billion revenue in 2023, an 13% increase year-on-year.
lol
I can’t prove the data wrong, but I will say it’s not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is. Tons of incentives to do so, little reason not to.
Also since you quote revenue not profit, they were still net unprofitable as of 2023 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/streaming-profit-report-netflix-disney-warners-paramount-nbcu-1235868631/
it’s not particularly uncommon for businesses to move money around in an effort to make new product seem better or more profitable than it is.
Didn’t Xbox do something like this? I heard they converted all remaining Xbox Live subscribers to Xbox Game Pass.
Yes, but they also brought back piracy, eroded faith in the brand, and while Disney+ is making money…
Disney’s newer efforts are kinda showing it’s not the powerhouse it used to be. With the only thing they really have going for them are the legacy media that they’re holding hostage on a platform, they arbitrarily removes things from time to time for seemingly no reason (the Willow series for example, which makes very little sense since that was original to Disney+ to begin with and for some reason Buzz Lightyear of Star Command isn’t on the platform despite all the other Toy Story media being present… and there are several episodes of The Simpsons that are just straight up memory-holed; most infamously the Michael Jackson episode)
If this trend continues, Disney will be left with people pirating the legacy media that people at home have shaky access to at best (Monthly fee for content that may be removed with no notice and for no reason), especially as prices soar and wages stay the same, and interest in newer project dwindling.
Or to be blunt, one of the most classic blunders: High short term profits at the cost of being unsustainable in the long term.
Sure it’s easy to think of Disney as laughing its way to the bank, but… think of it this way.
Disney’s been king of the world, especially in animation (Which has been getting sidelined in favor of live-action. I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind). They’re a luxury limousine running fast on a road that has no other cars (because Disney bought those cars), and the tank’s running out of gas. You won’t know it’s running on fumes until it comes to a complete stop, but at the speed it’s going it will take awhile…
And the second it stops, a simple fuel service isn’t going to get it running again. It will get running again, too many people need it to run. So they’ll call a mechanic, and it will take to the streets once more.
Is Disney cooked? of course not, but they will see a return of their darkest days. A decade or two of the Disney brand no longer being that shining seal of quality people take it for.
I see it comparable to Nintendo’s Wii-U days when the company was a joke with no 3rd Party support and consumers who weren’t even sure what the Wii-U was even supposed to be. (Too many passed on it, believing it to be an overpriced gimmicky tablet add-on for the Wii… The launch title being NSMBU instead of something fans hadn’t already seen before I think is a big part of the blame for that.)
Nintendo didn’t wind up in bankruptcy, but they’d need to reinvent the wheel via the Switch, win back 3rd Party Support, and rekindle the faith of the fans, to get back to being a power house.
Given Disney’s stranglehold on animation and general lack of interest in high quality 2d animation it’s been quite interesting seeing the market for high quality foreign animation grow so much. At one time Studio Ghibli relied on Disney for distribution in the US, but now they’re a name that can stand on its own (and with the gkids acquisition/merger we should be seeing more Japanese animation hitting American screens and theatres)
I have to expect foreign and indie animation studios to continue to grow in market share as Disney continues to ignore 2d animation and continues it’s overly rapid production schedules that don’t allow for the quality.
Simply put, you watch a non-disney animated film or even just any of Disney’s animated films from before they killed hand drawn animation and there’s so much quality lost, where you go from every single frame being it’s own masterpiece of artwork to just enough set dressing to not look out of place but good luck finding a still you’d want to hang on your wall.
I give it about 10 years before Disney is forced to course correct. Just long enough for kids who haven’t seen a good animated film released by Disney their entire childhoods to become teens/adults and start paying to consume competitors content instead
I give it five
Don’t forget another thing in common between Nintendo and Disney: lawsuits. And obsession with intellectual property. Not required to be against their own fans, but it is preferred.
I guarantee if Mufasa was animated it’d be running neck and neck with Sonic 3 instead of lagging behind).
But mufasa IS animated
It’s also shit. Animation only goes so far.
Say what you will about Sonic. No one involved in those films is having a bad time. There’s a lotta heart there and it shows.
Mufasa is shlok incarnate.
I love that IGN reviewed both movies and gave Sonic a 6 out of 10 despite saying it’s the “Best movie of the franchise” and that Jim Carey was amazing as both Dr. Robotnik and Dr. Robotnik. (For the record Sonic 1 and 2 were given a 7)
And that Mufasa was given an 8 out of 10 despite IGN’s review struggling to come up with anything nice to say.
It not only validates my own (low) opinion of IGN and their track record of hating on Sonic just because it’s Sonic, but it makes me laugh. We’re seeing big corporations slowly losing control.
They can’t tell us what we should like and not like anymore. The market has never been freer to decide what movies they like and what games to play. (Balatro being the only real game at the Awards with Remake, DLC, and Tech Demo being the other options is kind of hillarious)
Also it’s kinda weird, a movie inspired by Hamlet that demands to be taken seriously is considered low grade shlock, and an adaptation of a twenty year old old video game who’s greatest literary contribution is children’s comic books made to promote games, toys, and t-shirts is considered the PEAK of Cinema… Especially when such a thing is actually a sign of society recovering from brainwashing and not falling deeper into it.
I can hear Ebert rolling in his grave and I’m here for it.
I’ll also say this, Sonic 3 is a god damn masterpiece. It got me to take Maria’s death seriously.
In the games Maria Robotnik is such a shallow one-note character who I don’t even dislike, because there isn’t enough of her to form an opinion on one way or another.
Now sure, I’m happy to slap the shit out of anyone who’d dishonor her memory, but… I’m doing that as Shadow, to SHADOW she’s the only real friend he’s ever had. To me, she’s just a cheap attempt to get invested to take a story trying WAY too hard to be grimdark when all I really wanna do is go fast and
eat assgrab rings.Most Sonic characters serve a gameplay function, so all you really need is their archetype. Flying tech guy, Punchy boy, Lovesick Hammer Girl, Kicky boob lady, Skatebird with a skateboard, Trunks-from-DBZ and his crazy physics engine! (Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Rouge, Jet, and Silver)
Shadow however needs his narrative to back him up or else he’s just “Emo Sonic”
So I’ve seen Maria die many, many times, and honestly it keeps getting funnier as she slowly devolved from “Cheap tearjerker bait” to “Meme”
Sonic 3 gave Maria a character, actually showed her bonding with Shadow, and took her so seriously that if she were in any other movie franchise; This would be a film about a girl who makes friends with an alien and with the power of friendship is able to show everyone that he means no harm, and that it doesn’t matter what you look like, and all that with everyone singing a silly song over a campfire…
Sorry Maria, but this aint your faerie tale, it’s Shadow’s grim fable.
So when she died, she did something no Maria story, not in games, comics, or anime has ever done before. Even though I knew it was coming she made me feel, shock, anger, and misery to such an extent that it was all too easy to sympathize with Shadow’s pain.
You know what I mean
And they somehow just became profitable… while also already legacy owning thr vast majority of content
🏴☠️🎶"Yo! Ho! All hands, hoist the colours high!"🎶🏴☠️
That’s a weird as heck christmas song.
The One Piece is real!.. and can be seen on [Streaming Site REDACTED]
Pluto is also free with ads
I feel like people are ignoring that Netflix was bleeding money during their “golden age”. They only switched to being profitable a couple years back. A lot of times what people describe as enshittification is just unprofitable companies having to come up with an actual business model as venture capital dries up.
Also, merry Christmas:)
You can also argue that silicon valley has that particular business model of purposely making a product look great and cheap until enough people sign up.
It’s distinct from how most companies run in the red at their inception in that those traditional businesses would gladly be in the black but are waiting for economies of scale or building a reputation among consumers.
And that’s probably why people get so disappointed w/ tech companies.
It’s not that the prices they switch to are unreasonable, but that they hike prices after getting a user base, so it feels like a bait and switch instead of an early bird discount. If they made it an actual early bird discount, people would probably be fine with it.
Or maybe they keep prices the same, but drop content while keeping prices the same. If they instead structured it as a base tier and an “early bird” free access to a higher tier, which then starts costing money after some time period, I also think people would be okay with it. I have always thought Netflix should have packages, so you could opt-in to additional stuff like maybe Disney or HBO content. If Netflix did this early on, maybe Disney and HBO wouldn’t have bothered making their own streaming platforms and instead just raked in revenue from these higher tier customers, because they get most of the benefit of having their own streaming platform, with none of the costs.
In pretty much every case, I’ll point to Valve’s business model as an example. Gaming companies generally don’t feel the need to run their own platforms, and the ones that do often still distribute through other stores.
Valve was the first, their business model was basically removing retail (the actual reason for Steam was to make updates trivial, so a Counterstrike update didn’t break half the servers for 2 weeks), for everyone after Steam the business model was removing Steam by replacing it with a Steam clone.
That package thing they do on prime video
Yeah, but Prime sucks in other ways. I wish I could combine what I like about Prime and Netflix into one service.
Netflix has a market cap of 300bn. Public markets picked up right where venture capital left off no bother. The problem I think was the competitive forces as much as enshitified business model, though perhaps one cannot exist without the other. Certainly without doing their own content they could easily have become ludicrously profitable as a redistributer only, though I’m not convinced it would have stopped everyone and their dog moving in on the space.
Facebook is really the cleaner example of enshitification. They could have happily printed modest money for ever as the preeminent social network, but they took the greedy approach and morphed into a cesspool.
Merry Christmas to you!
If you take venture capital, you sacrifice your ability to not be greedy. Could Facebook have even existed without VC? Facebook didn’t have ads during its startup IIRC, which meant they had no revenue.
That’s a really interesting hypothetical. They always had ads but obviously the early scale and scope was smaller, so revenue was piddling early on. They had pretty limited costs though and were a super hot ticket to give capital to. I mean they needed some kind of financing for their trajectory, which maybe anyway would have pushed them to monetize aggressively any which way.
Ultimately I don’t think we’ll ever know and the examples of people choosing not to get filthy rich off the back of these innovations are extremely rare. Even when e.g. openAI gets set up explicitly as non profit it gets bastardised, so what chance does a regular joint stock company have of operating in the interests of consumers.
Theu saw the writing on the walls. They knew the big dogs would want a slice of the streaming game and they needed to pivot before the rug got pulled out from ubder them. Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products IIRC. It wasn’t just VC that got them to their golden era, they also relied on the industry bot taking streaming seriously enough and giving them deals that they never would today.
Hulu was already being constructed when they were recalling shifting into making their own products
Hulu has been around for a very long time (it’s also part of why their UI sucks ass while being owned by Disney. It’s the same UI they’ve had for years) they just didn’t fully invest in the marketing and content until Netflix proved to C-Suites how viable a streaming service actually was
It was launched on October 29, 2007, initially as a joint venture between News Corporation (later 21st Century Fox) and NBC Universal (later bought by Comcast), Providence Equity, and later The Walt Disney Company, serving as an aggregation of recent episodes of television series from their respective television broadcasting. In 2010, Hulu launched a subscription service, initially branded as “Hulu Plus”, which featured full seasons of programs from the companies and other partners, and un-delayed access to new episodes. In 2017, the company launched Hulu with Live TV—an over-the-top streaming television service offering access to broadcast television channels.
Netflix also launched their Internet streaming service in 2007 and in 2011 is when they separated the subscriptions so that the DVD service and the streaming service were different subscriptions, as well as when their first batch of originals/exclusives were released (House of Cards, season 5 of Arrested Development and they were the exclusive North American distributor for the Norwegian TV series Lilyhammer) and it really wasn’t for a few more years before all of the content licensing deals started expiring and being non-renewed, somewhere around 2018ish by my memory.
Since the last decade has been a blur, I’ll just summarize that HBO Max, Paramount+, Discovery+ and Peacock all didn’t launch until the 2020s, meanwhile Disney+ and Apple+ both launched in late 2019, accidentally timing themselves perfectly to grow immensely during the pandemic (and Disney+ was smart in bundling with Hulu since by that point they owned 2/3 of Hulu via their 21st Century Fox acquisition)
So while yes, Hulu probably was a hedge by legacy media companies, they didn’t really invest in it until Netflix already owned the streaming landscape
This (though you need to fix your typos). Movie companies saw Netflix as a garbage rerun channel. They were chasing after opening weekends. It took a long time for them to finally launch their own service.
Exactly this and more.
I’m not even pirating because it’s cheaper, or easier. I have near 100TB in storage, and it takes hours per week to search material, have it downloaded, checked, etc. I just am done with the marketing, the branding, the advertising, the bullshit rules. I just want to watch what I want to watch and media companies made this impossible so I’m forced to sail the high seas
Why not just… Automate that with an Arr stack? And use Jellyseer to find new and popular movies and shows.
Im looking into an arr stack but it seems there are a LOT of moving pieces. I’m technical enough to pull it off but also old enough to roll my eyes at seeing how many systems I’ll need to install, setup, configure, etc. sonar, bazaar, radarr, arrarr…
I dont suppose there is a single docker container to install that pulls and connects it all? I dont mind a bit of work but this sure seems a lot at first glance
There’s several that you can customize to your liking, and several megathreads about it on the old site we shall not speak of.
Thing is, the specific units you install can bedifferent depending on personal preference; I use qbittorrent instead of transmission for instance, Jellyfin instead of Plex, and so on.
Once you get it set up, though, everything else should go smoothly, and you’ll practically never have to do manual searches ever again (except those really niche shows nobody’s ever heard of).
There’s an example docker file from Rick45 on github, but as I noted, he uses stuff like Plex and Deluge instead. Feel free to just copy the example file and edit as needed for your preferred services.
Me, my preferred stack includes Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Jellyfin, qBittorrent, SurfShark, JellySeer, Flaresolver, and Organizer. Again, tweak as you’d like.
Wow that’s a lot.
How do you not think too much about hard drive failures 😅
Serious question though, how much do you spend on drives, they’re getting cheaper but it’s still around like 25€/TB where I live?
Not really worrying about it. Bought 5 20TB drives about a year ago, and a year from now I’ll buy 5 new ones
He spends about 2500€
100TB? Why?
Because its fun. Because i get obscure movies in high quality, maybe for posterity? I dunno, it’s a hobby. Why does anyone get a Warhammer 40K army?
Because that’s like 20,000 movies and I need two new movies to watch every night until the day I die, thanks.
More like 2500 and 250 complete series at the quality that I’m getting them.
Yeah, I won’t ever will watch half of that but at the moment it’s a nice hobby
I know when you can get petabytes, why stop at 100TB.
Build your own Netflix gets expensive after a while.
I found I watched a lot more once I installed Jellyfin rather than faffing around with files and folders whenever I wanted to watch anything.
pr0n
Anon got it backwards, networks noticed how profitable Netflix was and bumped the price for Netflix to stream their stuff. Netflix responded by producing their own content rather than leasing others’ at exorbitant rates. Then Netflix later got greedy and bumped their prices, lowered their quality, and cancelled all of their good shows.
I think it’s a bit of both. Netflix knew that companies choosing to pull their content would be a threat, so they prematurely started producing content (famously starting with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). Whether because they saw this as a threat or because of the perceived greater profitability of their own platforms (probably a bit of both), other studios started pulling their content from Netflix and setting up their own streaming sites.
And naturally, other companies pulling their content accelerated Netflix’s desire to produce their own content to ensure they weren’t left in the lurch.
Yall are overcomplicating things. Let me simplify.
Capitalist corporations + infinite greed = cannibalism
It’s remarkable how people can see right past what was actually happening and only see what they want to see. Netflix was never trying to be the good guy. Netflix didn’t offer low prices out of the goodness of it’s hearts. It doesn’t have a heart, it has a ledger. The reason why Netflix offered a lot of content for a low price is because the company was trying to disrupt traditional cable. It was always the plan to increase prices, Netflix didn’t become greedy, it always was. It’s just that for a time the companies greed aligned with the publics greed. Once that relationship was no longer beneficial to Netflix it raised the prices, that was the plan all along.
But that’s a zero sum argument. Every company is evil following that logic. No company does anything except for money.
You can make that argument, but it isn’t unique to Netflix.
You’re getting there! Just a little further, now.
There certainly are some companies that seek to do good, or are run by good people. Arizona Green Tea is the current favourite but there are for sure others. The thing is though that there’re huge incentives to being greedy and awful, and a distinct lack of punishment for that behaviour, to the point where so fucking many of these companies are either evil or committing enough evil actions that it doesn’t matter at all the difference anymore.
Also they weren’t saying that the argument is unique to Netflix but ok then.
That’s not overcomplicating it. That’s the exact impetus for Netflix to make their own content (nothing premature about it).
Yes, Netflix famously said they need to be HBO before HBO could become Netflix.
Yeah I consulted for the cable industry around the time that everyone was just starting to try to build their own services to compete with Netflix. It wasn’t a secret that production companies would be pulling their content. There were licensing agreements signed that had expiration dates.
So it was more like a race on both ends. Production companies were like “we get exclusive streaming rights to our movies back in X months, so we need to have our own platform up and running.” And Netflix was like “we lose streaming rights to these movies in X months, we need to make some content to replace it with.”
It doesn’t really matter, though. The only cause of companies pulling their content is Netflix’s success. There was no way Netflix could have prevented it.
RIP Inside Job
Unpopular opinion, but I wasn’t a fan. Was it a bad show? No! Did I enjoy it? Sometimes. How it developed the cult following that it has, I can’t quite piece together. Fantastic voice acting and sound design can only pull so much weight!
Fantastic acting and production quality can elevate any media but especially TV shows. Look at Shrinking for a prime example. It has the production quality of Dispatches From Elsewhere but it’s essentially a three camera sitcom like Modern Family or hell All in the Family. And it’s KILLING right now.
People like the humor of Inside Job and the fantastic quality made it so much better.
I guess if you’re in the market for cola, you’ll look for the cola with the best taste. But seeing a discontinued cola lauded as a fallen behemoth is a bit odd, from my perspective
I didn’t care for it either.
I gave it like 3-4 episodes but couldn’t do it. I thought given the cult following and reputation it’d be right up my alley.
An excellent concept with some interesting opportunities, butchered by regressing it to the same kitschy formulaic plotlines as every other uninspiring adult animation show. I don’t want Big Bang Theory, I want Twin Peaks.
#everybodysawful
Netflix didn’t get greedy (well not in that way). The movie companies wanted to make their own platform, which would have left Netflix with nothing. So they had to become their own production company. They said “we have to become a production company faster than production companies become streaming companies”.
2007? I remember watching a DivX of The Matrix back in 99. Prior to that I remember watching south park episodes in the RealPlayer.
I watched Key The Metal Idol in 56 kbps. Downloaded, of course, because trying to stream using RealPlayer never fucking worked. I’m pretty sure I could fire up a server and client over my home network, to-day, and it’d still pause with “Buffering…” twice per minute.
Anyway, I’m discussing video on Game Boy in another thread, and dial-up quality video was still ridiculous.
Those RealPlayer Southpark episodes were 15mb and had 8 pixels
South Park’s graphics were so bad back then that probably almost sufficed.
I watched the entirety of Blair witch project the week before it came out in a real player at 300 by 200 pixels. I kept rotating between watching it thumbnail sized and watching it regular player sized. Both were equally inferiorating
Yeah this was going on before that. Media Piracy really set-off in the late 90s when DSL, and cable, internet services became mainstream. Also Netflix started making their own content in response to a growing number of competing services, all fighting over the same pool of production companies’ work, and having exclusive rights to one IP, or another, rather than other services being the result of netflix making their own content.
Yes, but you are old as a rock.
Those times are lost in the unknowable pre-history of what we call “the internet” today.We’re just as stable!.. Maybe.
it would certainly make me feel better about myself if I knew rocks complain about their backs as much as I do
How do I know you’re not just a rock in a trench coat, complaining about human foibles like back pain to blend in???
Actually, how can I be sure I’m not?
Dun Dunn dunnnnnnn
Except people aren’t necessarily going back to piracy en masse
Torrent sites are dwindling, even the big ones have sad membership numbers compared to 10yrs ago
A large amount of internet users access the internet via devices that are openly hostile to or outright disallow anything that would enable piracy. The devices are then connected to an internet that is further hostile and aims to steer you away from anything deemed unsavory
Phones and tablets are cumbersome and unintuitive to navigate. In the case of apple torrent clients are not allowed to be listed on their app store and sideloading is involved and kind of a pain. Chromebooks and windows 11 are better obviously but less utilized then you’d think
But that leads to the second point, which is kind of angry old man yells at cloud, but people are just less tech inclined now. It makes sense because modern tech is designed to oppress the user whereas tech in the late 90s and early 2000s was more to empower them. They don’t bother to figure out how to install applications, use the file explorer, change settings, etc. the very basic steps needed to pirate shit (you obviously don’t need to be a super hacker). They don’t need to. The command prompt or a terminal is something that makes them think you’re hacking shit
They download applications like steam and then their browser auto opens the installer, then steam handles installing games and mods from that point on. They are safeguarded against having to deal with the icky filesystem and their hand is held every step of the way. Or they just download stuff from the official MS app store and even more hand holding. It’s okay because they’re only gonna install 5 streaming apps anyway and then use the browser to visit the 6 approved websites that google or bing search sends you to for basically any query.
And that’s only if they actually have a proper computer. If they have a tablet or phone they either are pushed extremely heavily towards the above scenario, or in the case of apple they simply have no other option
10 years from now the internet will just be 2-3 social media sites, a few shopping conglomerates, wikis, and streaming sites. The devices used to access will no longer let you access the filesystem directly, apps will be unable to be installed if they aren’t code signed by apple or google or ms or whoever, sealed in epoxy, and draconian drm everywhere. 40 years from now your grandchildren will think you’re weird for complaining about how you used to have autonomy and authority over your devices once you owned them and they’ll remind you it’s time to pay another $400 bezobucks to rent the google chrome ar internet hub for another month because you’re not allowed to own it and it’s a federal crime to take it apart
Direct download piracy and streaming is surprisingly popular.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Basically you select the movie, a system finds the torrent or DDL, a service downloads it (or has it cached) and you stream it to your device.
With a bit of effort you can stream any movie directly to your TV for a few moneys a month (or free, but paying for the essential bits removes the jankiness)
Something I learned back in the day: “Never pay for warez”. Pirate all you want, the moment you are paying, pay the creator of the product you’re interested in, not someone who pirated it and wants to profit from distributing it without a licence.
Except the value proposition still needs to make sense, so resigning to just pay the
creatorlicense holder exorbitant rates for ever-more-enshittified services is learning the wrong lesson.They have used their control over the system to grotesquely distort copyright from its original intent of getting more cultural works into the public domain for people to use and build on, to instead lock everything away for lifetimes. Don’t buy into their lies and propaganda that they have any moral high ground.
Stremio?
While I agree with the trend for the average person, I think in pure numbers there are always going to be more tech savvy people in the foreseeable future.
Sure, 80% of people online in the 2000s and 90s were all tech savvy hobbyists, but their numbers was low (let’s say a million).
Now only 0.5% might be tech savvy, but that is 0.5% of a billion people, which would be 5 mil compared to 800k above.
I obviously picked convenient numbers but the point still stands, there are lots of tech savvy places today and it’s growing, just not as fast as the non tech savvy crowd unfortunately.
I am personally still friends with two people who even know how to navigate their filesystem beyond clicking the downloads or my documents link in the start menu. I hope you’re right, but all I see around me at work and personal life is ignorance. People can’t even figure out how to use their phones beyond the basics.
Yeah, on average you will find less and less tech savvy people in real life moving forward.
But if you were to ask a programming question on the most popular coding site, you would get more responses today than 20 years ago.
Yeah, but what’s the relative quality of responses? I feel like the bar for “tech savvy” or “competent at programming” has dropped precipitously. And unfortunately, the number of people confidently asserting a wrong answer online is high in my experience, including on programming forums.
Think about it this way,
Has the total number of C++ experts gone down since 20 years ago or has it gone up? The total market share has gone down, but total amount of systems running C++ has increased.
Today is more lucrative to be an expert than 20 years ago, and there are far more positions that offer good money.
It’s also easier to make money by knowing very little programming.
So the question is, would the people capable of being a true expert avoid that path today even though it’s more lucrative, I don’t think so.
The only difference is, 20 years ago, only the true experts were online, now they probably don’t enjoy being online as much and are probably big fans of old school hobbies (like wood working)
I’m also inclined to believe what the other person was saying, because nowadays like you say people don’t know how to use their devices to their full potential, but then I remember there used to be a time when I was the only one with a smart phone and everyone else was looking at me like I’m a weirdo for being on this phone during a commute for example, something that today is normal.
The nerdy people are still there and know how to use these tools, the general masses are still as clueless as always, they are just late adopters that never learned anything past what the walled gardens feed them. At least that’s my feeling.
I hate you. Because you’re not really wrong in most parts. Ownership of devices pisses me off for what feels like an eternity now. I can’t imagine how sales would go for PCs if you would get not admin-access anymore. But I smell that future coming. At least if we had not all switched to Linux by then. But even if, then the war between corpos and community would be on the “you can’t access amazon from this insecure decice”-front.
Me, personally, currently live at the peak of piracy right now. The pinnacle I’ve dreamt of days back when selling wares on CDs for triple digits was a thing. Sonarr/radar/etc makes it so easy and awesome now. Enter a movie’s name, wait a minute, watch it.
As to your Netflix/streaming-point: add that only muricans had it THAT nice. Some countries had to pay full price yet only got access to like 30% (Romania, Italy,etc.). The rest got filled with local crap. You saw the shit when using search but then it was gone. I had Netflix for a year or so. When it was more comfy than wares. And then it gradually became worse but also more expensive. The usual enshittification
I think the end is where some people are moving but I think its a bit too pessimistic. While kids are becoming more tech illiterate there is always gonna be a certain amount of people that know a bit more than the masses and they are not gonna let themselves be pushed around.
What are they going to do? Manufacture their own silicon? The ability to make a computing device of reasonable power is fairly prohibitive and as things move forward manufacturers seem intent on doing things that are more and more hostile to consumers. You say people won’t let themselves be pushed around and that sounds nice but people have consistently done exactly that to date.
Our power as individuals is minimal here; we can vote politically and financially. These companies do amazing financially so voting with our wallets doesn’t work. Voting politically also hasn’t done in terms of enacting regulation aside from some small wins in a few states with right to repair (and big losses in many more states as well as federally). And given the fact that those wins are small and fragmented with only a very small handful of states having any policy (like less than 10) it’s likely that big tech will push back hard rather than simply comply. And we are heading into political times where regulations will likely continue to erode.
So as things worsen the people who “know a bit more” can have the choice of using cutting edge hardware that is more locked down, or being a stallman type that uses relatively ancient hardware full of compromises because it is compatible with an ideology. That is just but it also means they will be constantly hampered and the problem will only be compounded as technology becomes more advanced, which is inherent and constantly occurring
This is also not just a generational thing to be clear. People my age, younger, and older, who were into this stuff have become tech illiterate as time progressed because they’ve allowed themselves to move away from their computers and go to their phones which have become a reddit/youtube/tiktok/pintrest/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc box. The etc is whatever skinner box game they’re playing at the moment, because most of them who played actual games don’t even bother to play games anymore. They’re so caught up in the cycle of “engagement” that they don’t care about much else. they come home and doom scroll then complain about how they feel aimless and anxious all the time and never get stuff done
You’re right that there exceptions, but they seem to be dwindling
I’ve made a similar comment on r/austrian_economics and got called a communist for it lol
But yeah, well said.
Torrenting is less common but thats because most piracy is just streaming now. Its more profitable to host a streaming site, youre less likely to get a virus streaming compared to torrenting now, and its easier to access and find.
The less likely to get a virus point is arguable but I get what you’re saying
Really the thing is private trackers kind of put themselves out of the game. Like let’s look at a common path to get to some of the more well known coveted private trackers:
Do an irc interview about the rules and culture of a site with a staff member. You will have to study, sit in irc for god knows how long for someone to be available, and pass. Alternatively, know someone already in who trusts you and will burn an invite
Then you’re in. Now you have to upload music, which is much less commonly pirated bc music streaming isn’t fucking stupid and fragmented these days (though pricing keeps rising so maybe we’ll see a return). To get to the point where you can be invited to sites that would actually have movies and tv and games and shit you need 25 gigs uploaded and a 0.7 ratio minimum. Also the sites been around a while and the people on it are meticulous music collectors so finding something to upload is actually challenging, when you do you have to make sure you meet the strict guidelines, etc
That’s a lot! Like learning to use a torrent client is easy. Asking a 2024 tech dummy to learn irc? Come on. At the same time the filter is needed, the people who truly want to be there are what make the communities so great, and the vetting process is what keeps feds out (for the most part they go for low hanging fruit sites like rarbg)
tbf, there are alternatives to torrenting now. I usually recommend fmovies, sudo-lol, or other streaming websites because the barrier to entry for those sites is just knowing the URL and having ublock origin.
I agree with you though that today’s young adults are not as technologically inclined as young adults of the early 2000s where torrenting was rampant. But everyone understands a website.
Torrenting is hard compared to a visiting a website. Not only do you have to vet each torrent, you have to download a second piece of software (torrent client) to make sure it works, all the while making sure your router is set up correctly. And even if they set all this up correctly, they’ll get a letter/email saying that they downloaded a file illegally since they didn’t use a VPN. That will scare a novice user and stop torrenting.
Real-debrid is a weird one, it’s clearly you paying for piracy, but they’ve been around since forever.
I personally don’t have too much of an issue for paying for piracy. It’s money I would pay to Netflix if their catalog was decent.
Servers cost money.
If anything, these assholes streaming companies should see people paying for pirated content and say, “We should do better” instead of “ThEy ArE sTeAlInG oUr CoNtEnT!”
Edit: I looked up Real Debrid. Their website is sketchy. What exactly is it?
My understanding is that it’s torrent and direct download caching on a massive scale, by file hash or something like that.
They cache torrents, magnets and ddl links at an astonishing scale.
You can put in pretty much any even decently popular magnet or ddl link set and get a direct download link with near infinite bandwidth (my 500Mbit connection is saturated every time)
This is spot on.
I haven’t stopped sailing those seas. A pirate’s life for me. :)
Same same same yaaaar
