It’s like cars. Almost everyone has one and can drive it but don’t know how it works. Computers have become that. There are some who know or have an idea of how it works and others who can use it but have no idea.
I can’t even tell you what us Gen Xers did because I am not sure if the statutes of limitations have run.
Vaguely, it involved ftp and file repositories hosted unwittingly by large companies plus restricted IRC channels to discuss the locations of such places.
We know how to torrent mate we aren’t dumb
the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I’ve shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.
anyway, it’s so easy, it’s crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.
What’s there to learn? You just simply download a client, go into thepiratebay (if it still exists, dunno, havent torrented a thing for like 10 years), click download and wait.
And these days magnet links are everywhere, making it even a little simpler
It is more difficult than a few years ago, especially if you don’t want to get sued or get a threatening letter from your ISP.
I would only torrent with a VPN and a private tracker. It’s certainly not difficult to learn, but absolutely requires some small amount of information to acquire.
does the rest of gen z not know how to torrent? i thought everyone did
No.
I’ve pointed this out on another account on this very community through KBin Social.
And I was talking about how lazy and entitled pirates across all ages have become overtime. That we were losing more and more sources that had withstood a long standing of time. And one moment everyone is going “RAH RAH! HYDRA! CUT ONE DOWN AND MORE COME UP!” but when we lose some of which that have yet to return or take it’s place, the attitude grows weak. Almost desperate.
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”. There are few pirates out there doing the work and it’s just so that these lazy and entitled pirates can just take and take.
But when we lose sources, they scatter away like cockroaches and all that they can think about is asking where it is that they can get free shit. It’s almost like consumerism but for free shit, it’s annoyingly disturbing. It’s not about wanting the new product, it’s about wanting the source to mooch off from.
I sadly predict in time that the whole hydra ideology will just simply become the way the Pirate Bay has become, just a symbol, but will it mean anything? It’ll be so if this whole trend continues and all generations are just as guilty to doing it.
The best pirates are librarians with legit ethics.
Preserve human knowledge and make it available to everyone.
I hate that you are right about mostly just greedy dipshits pissing in the high seas without contributing.
We should have taken up arms after Aaron Swartz…
I agree with the sentiment that it’s very easy to underestimate the harm done by the loss of a major site or scene group, but I’m not sure I really agree with much else you’ve written here. In particular:
And it’s due in part how most of the pirates just take and take, but never give back. On r/piracy and sometimes on here, people are making posts wondering where they can get free stuff and how they can get free stuff. They don’t care about the technicalities, they don’t care about the cause of piracy, they don’t care at all. It’s always “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
The people making those posts have minimal exposure to piracy. This is getting your feet wet. For me, contributing my share is saying that I think these users deserve access. Yeah, they wouldn’t have a place on a private tracker, that’s not a problem because they’re not on a private tracker, and if they join one they won’t stay for long if they neglect seeding.
I’m sure a lot of these people will continue their lives without seeding or contributing. I won’t say I endorse that, but I’m cool with it, and even if I wasn’t I still don’t think an argument can made that the harms of any hypothetical injustice here outweigh the benefits from a single dedicated pirate that began their journey this way.
I care about uploader counts, about seeder counts, about the wellbeing of the people who maintain the infrastructure. I’m invested. I don’t care about download counts. Looking at an unseeded download as a loss in seeder count makes exactly the same amount of sense to me as looking at a download as a lost sale. I think it’s morally right to support pirates who will not end up contributing, and beyond that I think treating them with kindness a net plus for the cause, because less than 100% of them will just say “give me free shit, thanks, bye”.
To complete if you share back and join or multiple private trackers you can get all latest contents.
I think the gap stems from need. Most people only learn what they absolutely need to. My sister and I are just 3 years apart in age. Yet I am pretty familiar with tech, while she knows next to nothing. I was always there to fix whatever broke. Even now she knows that if she needs to watch something, she can just ask me to add it to my Jellyfin server. I often have to remote into her system to fix stuff.
The Gen Z we’re talking about here mostly grew up using phones, and phone OSes do their best to hide any complexity away from the user. So they never learnt anything. I’m also technically Gen Z (very early), but growing up in rural India, I had to teach myself how to pirate since streaming wasn’t a thing yet (our internet was too slow for that anyway), and the local theater didn’t play anything except local mainstream cinema.
Jellyseerr is your friend. She can request whatever and you can get alerts to add it. Even if your stuff isn’t automated
I know about Jellyseerr, but I find it not worth it since there are very few people that send me requests. Messaging apps are enough for that.
Whatever works for you, simple is always better
Teaching college students, I agree that phones and ‘need’ are largely the culprit.
Loss of typing skill, trouble shooting skill, and file directory skill.
Better at cameras generally
I also teach college students lol. People can’t even figure out how to upload assignments from their phone. Had a student tell me that she broke her laptop, so can’t submit an assignment even though it was already written. She was gonna scan it from her phone, airdrop to her laptop, and then upload the files to Canvas. I tried to explain that she can do it on the mobile app for Canvas instead. I eventually had to give up and asked her to drop it at my office. It literally felt like explaining stuff to my ma.
Congrats on making me want to pull my youngest from public school for a year or so, so I can teach her typing, scripting, the command line, etc … (also, phonics) … Blows my mind that TYPING as a late-elementary-school glass is basically gone in our school district, nor is it a class that’s even available in middle or high-school.
I’m gen z born in the early 200xs and I torrent (legal Linux ISOs ofc)
How else are you going to get your hands on the latest build of Hannah Montana Linux?
It’s not just a generational thing — most of the millennials who were torrenting 15 years ago (which was a lot of them!) have completely forgotten by now ime. Now I’m longing for the days when ‘VLC is the best media player’ was common knowledge and not arcana
I mean…it’s still the best ffdshow wrapper imho
Need more disks…
so i do torrent stuff when i want to keep it, but the vast majoriy of my media i just stream from whatever shady site i happen to find it on first. it’s too quick and easy.
protip if you ever have trouble finding anything, just use yandex. russia doesn’t give a SHIT about copyright violations or DMCA complaints.
Yandex is extremely useful for finding obscure stuff that doesn’t show up on the usual torrent sites.
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 90s and I’ve had to show a few younger peers how to torrent recently.
The idea of you needing a “special” program just for downloading a file seems to throw some of them off.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
One other thing I’ve noticed, People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices. Which its good people give at least a bit of a shit about security but convincing people Firefox isn’t a virus gets a bit annoying (Yes I’ve had that conversation).
People just seem to be more paranoid about downloading stuff not already installed on their devices.
I see this as a natural byproduct of Google, Apple, et al. “Walled Garden”
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of. Granted Apple is far more on the latter side than Google but even Google fought tooth and nail to keep Epic from having their own store.
I don’t interact much with people who are younger than me but I feel like the age of tinkering might not be as strong with them as it was for me. PCs were the predominant form factor and you could literally take it apart and put it back together with just a screwdriver. You can’t do that with laptops or phones at least not without a lot of other specialized tools. This isn’t their fault either since device manufacturers have really tried to make it difficult to do anything that they don’t control.
Hell chrome is the best example of this. Google, whose business is selling your personal data for ads, is preventing the use of ad blockers. Firefox is mostly developed by Mozilla with a small handful of volunteers. It’s already showing signs of enshittification. We don’t have a viable third option.
It will only be a matter of time before these tech companies start having brain drains due to their own greed.
They want you to consume only from them and only what they approve of
Not just that, I remember when app stores were new and people clamoured to be on them AND those app makers would often move to ONLY being on the app store, with anything downloaded off-store being a scam
So a lot of people grew up to use these devices at a time where downloading something off the web was more likely than not to be malware, giving them the ick on the idea as a whole
Fuck, I’m from the time a bit before all of that and even I have a goddamn hard time downloading shit that’s available off-store on someone’s website out of pure paranoia from those days
I’m an older GenZ born in the late 1900s…
FTFY
EDIT:
Many of my Gen-X colleagues in tech (looking at you Stanford alumni) have been really into making sure their kids got into math, science and tech from an early age. So I think tech is going to be like medicine or law. Households with one or two parents in tech are more likely to produce tech savvy children by default. Everyone else will require effort.
I do know a few young people are tech/programming wizards but “generally tech savy” people seem to be declining. It’s either you’re really into it or barely know anything outside popular apps.
I feel like we also got a new kind of guy, the tech-forward digital illiterate. They run most of everything.
i remember not using firefox for a rlly long time bc i heard it’s ram usage with multiple tabs open was a lot less efficient than other browsers. idk if that’s true but i use firefox w 4 windows with 20+ tabs each and have never had a problem
this may still be true, we just tend to have more RAM nowadays
ah makes sense. i also have a pretty big swap file so i think that helps a bit when im doing other ram intensive stuff
When tested with 10 tabs open, Firefox occupied about 960MB of memory, which is only slightly less than Chrome.
Why can’t browsers treat torrents as just another protocol for downloads, so that if you haven’t got a default set for torrent out magnet mimetypes, it just downloads it in the included download manager?
Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.
The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.
Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.
You just reminded me there actually was a browser called Torch that could download torrents like a normal download. It was basically just Chrome with a built-in torrent client.
I remember trying it out when it first came out in 2012. It never caught on and looks like the last release was in 2020.
This would be terrible, because any website could potentially make you a seeder for „illegal“ content while normally browsing the web without a VPN. Meaning, your real IP address may accidentally be recorded by some lawerers and you’ll get a fine for whatever you accidentally shared (very dangerous, depending on country).
There are already solutions for webtorrents, but at least these scripts can be blocked.
No Herr officer, I was just trying to download my favorite distros, and I don’t know where all that Metallica/Disney/Nintendo came from.
Brave does I think. I didn’t allow it to do so the one time I saw the pop up and I would not want that to happen unless I was always behind a VPN.
I’m sure they probably could but they don’t really have the incentive to add support for them.
Gen X: Oh, internet eh? So we don’t need to keep copying umpteenth generation video cassettes of that dodgy pirate movie any more.
Elder Gen-X: “I spent all weekend making this mix tape off of songs on the radio. I even got London Calling without the DJ!”
gen zalpha here!! we few who torrent do exist
You are like the .01% good job.
I seen teens without being able to make a folder in windows because they only use phones, so.
I truly hate that phones don’t readily have file browsers and folders, and when you do add them, they aren’t effective. Mostly that would be useful when moving files between phone and computer. It’s not simple even to get the computer to mount the phone’s drive, probably because everyone is fine with having all their files “in the cloud.”
Super annoying because all the earlier smart phones did have all that, even early Android. The OSes just keep getting more dumbed down and locked down to the point that I went from a phone enthusiast to despising all smart phones.
Not only that but the physical phones themselves are dumping features while charging the same or often increased prices…
My current phones literally being held together with tape but wanting a current phone with an SD card and headphone jack has seriously limited my options.
I am right there with you. My Pixel 4a is still going, but there doesn’t appear to much anything on the market to replace it that doesn’t have a boatload of caveats.
There’s torrent clients on Android. You don’t need a computer
many such cases.
