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.
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, 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.
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
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.
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?
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)
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)
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.
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.
War on general purpose computing
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)
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)
This is spot on.