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?

In the late 90s and very early 00's you could google yahoo song names and get a downloadable mp3 link as one of the first results.
Cause search engines simply showed websites that contained your search terms, without filtering and AI algorithms.

omg, speed, why has no one said 'speed' yet? An hour-long tv show was 350mb, and it took three days to download.

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 might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.

I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it's fantastic.

Closing Time is no longer by Green Day

Downloading a movie only to find out it was actually porn.

Or the other way around.

People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn't any where close to that. Probably hasn't been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don't seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.

In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you're left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.

Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.

What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that's what librarians do.

If I had the power I'd take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.

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.

I used to pirate games because there was no legal digital distribution. The pirate version I could get faster and wouldn’t hassle me to put the right disk in the drive before I could play.

Then digital distribution got good, DRM got less obnoxious, and malware got meaner.

I used to pirate music for similar reasons.

I didn’t pirate video because the files were too large, and around the time bandwidth caught up, Netflix got good. Now digital video distribution is awful so I pirate video until they solve the fractured storefront problem.

yourpiratedmovie.exe

Thanks, Limewire!

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

I had lots of time to play games, but not a lot of money to buy games.

Now it's the other way round.

If I could bring back anything from back then, it's boxed PC games that can be resold and traded. Covered a lot of my gaming needs from second hand shops.

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.

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.

I miss my hard drive full of music. Sure some of it was mislabeled, but at least I didn't have to deal with ads.

I remember that my brother acquired the full collection of every single song which had ever been on the top 20 list of songs for a national newspaper. It dated all the way back to the 60's, which is ancient for my brother and I, both born around the early 90s. I never got close to listening to the full thing, but it was awesome to have a collection of songs which basically no one knew existed and be able to choose a random year and pick a popular song from then to listen to.

You could do pretty much the same thing now, but the fact that it's so easily available and accesible kills a lot of the magic.

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.

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.

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.

*arrs auto downloading stuff for sure.

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...

I miss mixed CDs. You meet someone, you understand their music tastes, and you make them a mix of stuff that you think they'd like, but from your favorite known artists. I made plenty, and ones I received got me into some awesome bands.

[off topic]

I remember the golden age of the DVD Man. That noble soul who had all the latest movies on DVD a day after they opened. Quality ranged from someone recording the movie in the theater with a camcorder to perfect copies taken directly from the source.

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.

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.

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.

A lot less VCDs and MP3s downloaded from FTP servers and BBSes.

Not sure if I’d bring it back, but I sure do miss the fun of playing Quake against my mates on public servers.

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.

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.

Mp3 to cdda sounds like shit

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.

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.

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

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

The reason of pirating things because you would be offline has mostly disappeared. Partially because mobile data has become more affordable but also because more subscription based apps give you some way to consume content offline.

Where I see this the most is with music. Outside of those who want FLAC quality I don't know of a lot of people who pirate music anymore.

Honestly? I have no idea how to pirate now. That's the biggest change.

The simplicity of a lot of things, such as search engines giving you workable links, torrent pages didn't have 11 buttons that said download. Even malware was innocent and you could avoid getting into trouble by avoiding Linkin-park_Hybrid-theory.exe

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.