10 ms·

There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole

by kace91 5y ago

There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information. In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. Perhaps it was just the jump from scarce physical media to digital abundance. Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate, rather than stumbling on information by accident. Perhaps it's just nostalgia... but I feel we've lost something on the way, that we should have kept for the next generation.

marcodiego 5y ago
Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  I've been pleased to see that YouTube Content ID usually just results in attribution (a good thing!) and monetisation (ads) - it's not totally illegal to upload someone else's song. There are a couple of times when it has been totally deleted though (Universal Studios Japan deleting Monoeyes songs), so that's why I prefer not to use my personal Google account for sharing content - losing access to GMail as a result of sharing something on YouTube is not a risk I'd like to take. I wish there were a way to bulk-upload music (from, say, the 1.3 TB MySpace Dragon Hoard), but personal accounts are limited to 50 songs per day.
ianlevesque 5y ago
Arguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.
- grensley 5y ago
  "If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company. Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks. Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65). I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
  - loonster 5y ago
    Sports packages should license more camera feeds. Make the normal cheap package like it is now. Add in a deluxe package where you have 4+ camera options to look at. Bars would eat it up. Everyone has a large TV in there home. Very few people have the space for 4 large TVs in livingroom.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - dharmab 5y ago
    F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is growing faster than ever before and is profitable for the first time in years.
__Admin__ 5y ago
We are busy keeping it! Join us in groups like data horders and snahp.it forums.
dnfghdfgh 5y ago
The content you readily have access to now is far far more curated by others than you realize, largely because it's so easy to use. It's a bit of legwork and both legally and ethically questionable, but a modern usenet|(radarr||sonarr)|nzbget|jellyfin pipeline makes the legal providers seem obscenely limited. It doesn't matter who has negotiated what license with whom -- if I want to watch a bit of media, I can usually do so in high quality with a few clicks and a few minutes wait. (rarely more than 30 minutes for the 4k good stuff)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- VortexDream 5y ago
  The tools around Usenet are amazing and easily blow any legal offering out of the water. I don't currently use it, but when I did years ago, it was fairly easy to setup a completely automated system to download any shows/movies I'm interested in at the right quality level and make them available to me within minutes of release. I still miss it and with the increase of competing services I've gravitated more towards piracy than I have since my Usenet days.
dunce9242021 5y ago
> and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. because you don't actually "have" the files.
silisili 5y ago
I agree. Thinking about it, probably to do with discovery. In those days, the idea of just mindlessly flipping through content didn't really exist, except on TV or radio. So we had to ask for recs, google for top charts and new albums, etc to know what to find, specifically. Today it's too easy. Why research, Spotify/Netflix and the like will dump more in your face than you could handle in a lifetime. Added to that, there's not much concept of 'building a collection' anymore. It used to be a personal point of pride. I have 3000 songs! Today the model is to just stream everything on the fly.
thunderbong 5y ago
I too feel the same way. I think that's because not everyone had access, inclination or capability to access all that. Speeds were way lesser, bandwidth wasn't unlimited, most people were still on CDs and were more keen on converting them for the MP3 players. Now that everyone can listen to all the music at any time using user-friendly apps, maybe it isn't as rare anymore. Nowadays, everyone's on the internet, practically all the time, with everything standardized, be it interfaces, commerce or buzzwords/jargon. From 'The Incredibles' - >> If everyone is special, no one is.
fsckboy 5y ago
what was that service in the post-Napster world, it was sort of exclusive, very well curated (so to speak), you needed an invite to join, even music industry insiders used it, described by Trent Reznor as the "world's greatest record store"... till it got shut down. I think it used a pig as a mascot. Then there was an even more secret attempt to revive it OiNK! FOUND IT! https://nymag.com/news/features/42391/ https://nymag.com/news/features/42391/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/oink-founder-free-after-two-plus-years-of-legal-troubles/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/oink-founder-fre...
lupire 5y ago
It's because going from 100 songs to 10K is more of an experience than going from 10K to 1M. A human can only listen to a limited number of songs. Also, you were 20years younger and so were more enthralled by novelty.
dleslie 5y ago
The only music services that I find provides a similar experience to the discovery experience within Napster are Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Both encourage you to "snoop" at other users' collections, and provide an enormous range of independent and esoteric music.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Napster, and The Pirate Bay, were my best years on the internet. I still think The Pirate Bay was the best website ever, but for degenerate disenfranchised Pirates like myself. I learned Watchmaking from that site, and I doubt 90% of the stuff I downloaded was copy written. Oh yea, I ended up buying all the books I downloaded over the years. My horology library has probally 40 books, and I ended up with a side occupation.
- rcpt 5y ago
  Silk Road tho
sillysaurusx 5y ago
It's because you were younger. It happens to everyone. You think younger people now don't feel the same way you did? And that they won't wistfully be talking about the times that Youtube gave them all the content they could ever dream of? Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it.
- BitAstronaut 5y ago
  They have never downloaded a video off Napster or Limewire and realized it's actually... well, not the video they wanted.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Actually burst out laughing at this. I almost forgot. Yeah, those were "fun" days. I'm not sure I'd go back to them.
  - sdfjkl 5y ago
    How else would we even know Japanese puke porn existed!
  - delecti 5y ago
    I remember as a youth I was very excited to find an early cam of Matrix Revolutions on Kazaa, only to find it was some porno that wasn't even very good.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  We were stealing, and it felt good at the time. It would probally feel better now, but the consequences are too stiff. It felt good to be a gangster at a time when the laws were grey, or enforcment was not as easy as today?
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Eh? How can you steal something that's infinitely copyable? Ahh never mind, I don't feel like getting into it.
varenc 5y ago
Modern forms of pirating still exist give you far more control over how you use the content. I’ll pirate something I’ve bought just so I can fix the subtitle syncing issues that for some reason plague streaming services.
sandworm101 5y ago
>> ... to digital abundance. Really? Spotify and Netflix pale in comparison to what Napster was. For all the content you think you have access to, Napster gave us the ability to see what other people had stored on their drives, stuff that they wanted to share rather than whatever media Spotify has a license for. That opened a world of discovery unmatched by any streaming service, or all of them put together. Want a club track from an unknown Russian group that only existed for a few nights back in 1998? That was on Napster. Netflix cannot deliver classic Simpsons episodes.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  No streaming site will ever have licenses for the bizarre remixes of video game themes, or the Sesame Street theme, that made their way around Napster. More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.
  - Assumer 5y ago
    Grooveshark came close, but it was always going to get shut down
    - consumer451 5y ago
      Hotline was pretty exciting. Did anyone else here get involved with this? [0] Back when broadband had just hit Seattle I ran a server on an old PowerPC IA paraphrased quote from a user: > I am actually signed to TVT records but it this server’s contents that enables my creativity. These days I pay for everything, but that testament to digital freedom sticks with me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
      - karlshea 5y ago
        Yes! Hotline was wild.
      - 5y ago
ryandrake 5y ago
You got a brief, glorious whiff of what a world without artificial scarcity is like. We'll get another whiff when someone invents Star Trek style replicators, before they are also outlawed by the moneyed interests who benefit from lack of abundance.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  We have already "Star Trek style replicators", at least for information. They're called "digital computers". But humanity isn't ready to handle that it seems.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    But if people are free from scarcity, how will Apple and Google continue making trillions of dollars? Corporations are people, too! /s
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    that is exactly what parent said. information replication is free, but it has been siloed by the large coprorations because big tech trumps prosperity . Looks like star trek got their abundance utopia wrong.
ihusasmiiu 5y ago
I don't use Spotify just because whole genres are not there. And I'm not talking about some obscure music from 150 years ago. Even Jungle Tekno from the early to mid 90s can't be found. The only sources are some 50 years old random guy fondly remembering their MDMA-fueled glory days and uploading their records on YouTube, vinyl from Discogs, or private trackers.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Going to need some sauce on those private trackers, thx.
cblconfederate 5y ago
far more doesnt mean far more wide range. With P2P you could browse a server for the popular, as well as a bunch of things you d never heard. And it wasnt just music, just about anything , specifically very obscure stuff. anarchist material was something often uploaded. It was like you could see the whole jungle. Google is instead a zoo. (Incidentally, what is the current evolution of gnutella, or any P2P that allows to browse the remote server?)
- juangacovas 5y ago
  You reminded me The Eye [1], an archive of stuff like that including old software and an overwhelming bunch of non-mainstream and abandoned things [1] https://the-eye.eu/ https://the-eye.eu/
  - WallyFunk 5y ago
    > Living without the knowledge of our past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots We need a The Eye for The Eye that backs up The Eye
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) I don't. I am tired of looking up a movie in some service I pay for and getting nothing. It doesn't matter what streaming company I choose, there's always something that just isn't there. Music? If you stray from the mainstream path, you're on your own. Mercifully YouTube is still a respectable repository of music. There are often gaps in the playlists now but what can you do? Back then we had instant access to everything humanity had ever created. The monopolists ruined it all and replaced it with their garbage services.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
There was no algorithm to "guide" your search, there was no limitation, no manipulation. Just you get what you see, and what you get - is all there is. Everything from there, was experience-wise a downgrade.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
TheJoeMan 5y ago
“Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate” It’s not just you. Spotify makes you think “here’s a song similar to the last one” but I’m sure that algorithm is skewed by this record label or that, or the cost per play is cheaper for this one, and it’s not “discovery” anymore but spoonfed

by kace91 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago

Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.

peterburkimsher 5y ago
I've been pleased to see that YouTube Content ID usually just results in attribution (a good thing!) and monetisation (ads) - it's not totally illegal to upload someone else's song. There are a couple of times when it has been totally deleted though (Universal Studios Japan deleting Monoeyes songs), so that's why I prefer not to use my personal Google account for sharing content - losing access to GMail as a result of sharing something on YouTube is not a risk I'd like to take. I wish there were a way to bulk-upload music (from, say, the 1.3 TB MySpace Dragon Hoard), but personal accounts are limited to 50 songs per day.

ianlevesque 5y ago

Arguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.

grensley 5y ago
"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company. Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks. Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65). I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.
- loonster 5y ago
  Sports packages should license more camera feeds. Make the normal cheap package like it is now. Add in a deluxe package where you have 4+ camera options to look at. Bars would eat it up. Everyone has a large TV in there home. Very few people have the space for 4 large TVs in livingroom.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- dharmab 5y ago
  F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is growing faster than ever before and is profitable for the first time in years.

__Admin__ 5y ago

We are busy keeping it! Join us in groups like data horders and snahp.it forums.

dnfghdfgh 5y ago

The content you readily have access to now is far far more curated by others than you realize, largely because it's so easy to use. It's a bit of legwork and both legally and ethically questionable, but a modern usenet|(radarr||sonarr)|nzbget|jellyfin pipeline makes the legal providers seem obscenely limited. It doesn't matter who has negotiated what license with whom -- if I want to watch a bit of media, I can usually do so in high quality with a few clicks and a few minutes wait. (rarely more than 30 minutes for the 4k good stuff)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
VortexDream 5y ago
The tools around Usenet are amazing and easily blow any legal offering out of the water. I don't currently use it, but when I did years ago, it was fairly easy to setup a completely automated system to download any shows/movies I'm interested in at the right quality level and make them available to me within minutes of release. I still miss it and with the increase of competing services I've gravitated more towards piracy than I have since my Usenet days.

dunce9242021 5y ago

> and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. because you don't actually "have" the files.

silisili 5y ago

I agree. Thinking about it, probably to do with discovery. In those days, the idea of just mindlessly flipping through content didn't really exist, except on TV or radio. So we had to ask for recs, google for top charts and new albums, etc to know what to find, specifically. Today it's too easy. Why research, Spotify/Netflix and the like will dump more in your face than you could handle in a lifetime. Added to that, there's not much concept of 'building a collection' anymore. It used to be a personal point of pride. I have 3000 songs! Today the model is to just stream everything on the fly.

thunderbong 5y ago

I too feel the same way. I think that's because not everyone had access, inclination or capability to access all that. Speeds were way lesser, bandwidth wasn't unlimited, most people were still on CDs and were more keen on converting them for the MP3 players. Now that everyone can listen to all the music at any time using user-friendly apps, maybe it isn't as rare anymore. Nowadays, everyone's on the internet, practically all the time, with everything standardized, be it interfaces, commerce or buzzwords/jargon. From 'The Incredibles' - >> If everyone is special, no one is.

fsckboy 5y ago

what was that service in the post-Napster world, it was sort of exclusive, very well curated (so to speak), you needed an invite to join, even music industry insiders used it, described by Trent Reznor as the "world's greatest record store"... till it got shut down. I think it used a pig as a mascot. Then there was an even more secret attempt to revive it OiNK! FOUND IT! https://nymag.com/news/features/42391/ https://nymag.com/news/features/42391/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/oink-founder-free-after-two-plus-years-of-legal-troubles/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/oink-founder-fre...

lupire 5y ago

It's because going from 100 songs to 10K is more of an experience than going from 10K to 1M. A human can only listen to a limited number of songs. Also, you were 20years younger and so were more enthralled by novelty.

dleslie 5y ago

The only music services that I find provides a similar experience to the discovery experience within Napster are Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Both encourage you to "snoop" at other users' collections, and provide an enormous range of independent and esoteric music.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Napster, and The Pirate Bay, were my best years on the internet. I still think The Pirate Bay was the best website ever, but for degenerate disenfranchised Pirates like myself. I learned Watchmaking from that site, and I doubt 90% of the stuff I downloaded was copy written. Oh yea, I ended up buying all the books I downloaded over the years. My horology library has probally 40 books, and I ended up with a side occupation.

rcpt 5y ago
Silk Road tho

sillysaurusx 5y ago

It's because you were younger. It happens to everyone. You think younger people now don't feel the same way you did? And that they won't wistfully be talking about the times that Youtube gave them all the content they could ever dream of? Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it.

BitAstronaut 5y ago
They have never downloaded a video off Napster or Limewire and realized it's actually... well, not the video they wanted.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Actually burst out laughing at this. I almost forgot. Yeah, those were "fun" days. I'm not sure I'd go back to them.
- sdfjkl 5y ago
  How else would we even know Japanese puke porn existed!
- delecti 5y ago
  I remember as a youth I was very excited to find an early cam of Matrix Revolutions on Kazaa, only to find it was some porno that wasn't even very good.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
We were stealing, and it felt good at the time. It would probally feel better now, but the consequences are too stiff. It felt good to be a gangster at a time when the laws were grey, or enforcment was not as easy as today?
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Eh? How can you steal something that's infinitely copyable? Ahh never mind, I don't feel like getting into it.

varenc 5y ago

Modern forms of pirating still exist give you far more control over how you use the content. I’ll pirate something I’ve bought just so I can fix the subtitle syncing issues that for some reason plague streaming services.

sandworm101 5y ago

>> ... to digital abundance. Really? Spotify and Netflix pale in comparison to what Napster was. For all the content you think you have access to, Napster gave us the ability to see what other people had stored on their drives, stuff that they wanted to share rather than whatever media Spotify has a license for. That opened a world of discovery unmatched by any streaming service, or all of them put together. Want a club track from an unknown Russian group that only existed for a few nights back in 1998? That was on Napster. Netflix cannot deliver classic Simpsons episodes.

nitrogen 5y ago
No streaming site will ever have licenses for the bizarre remixes of video game themes, or the Sesame Street theme, that made their way around Napster. More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.
- Assumer 5y ago
  Grooveshark came close, but it was always going to get shut down
  - consumer451 5y ago
    Hotline was pretty exciting. Did anyone else here get involved with this? [0] Back when broadband had just hit Seattle I ran a server on an old PowerPC IA paraphrased quote from a user: > I am actually signed to TVT records but it this server’s contents that enables my creativity. These days I pay for everything, but that testament to digital freedom sticks with me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
    - karlshea 5y ago
      Yes! Hotline was wild.
    - 5y ago

ryandrake 5y ago

You got a brief, glorious whiff of what a world without artificial scarcity is like. We'll get another whiff when someone invents Star Trek style replicators, before they are also outlawed by the moneyed interests who benefit from lack of abundance.

still_grokking 5y ago
We have already "Star Trek style replicators", at least for information. They're called "digital computers". But humanity isn't ready to handle that it seems.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  But if people are free from scarcity, how will Apple and Google continue making trillions of dollars? Corporations are people, too! /s
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  that is exactly what parent said. information replication is free, but it has been siloed by the large coprorations because big tech trumps prosperity . Looks like star trek got their abundance utopia wrong.

ihusasmiiu 5y ago

I don't use Spotify just because whole genres are not there. And I'm not talking about some obscure music from 150 years ago. Even Jungle Tekno from the early to mid 90s can't be found. The only sources are some 50 years old random guy fondly remembering their MDMA-fueled glory days and uploading their records on YouTube, vinyl from Discogs, or private trackers.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Going to need some sauce on those private trackers, thx.

cblconfederate 5y ago

far more doesnt mean far more wide range. With P2P you could browse a server for the popular, as well as a bunch of things you d never heard. And it wasnt just music, just about anything , specifically very obscure stuff. anarchist material was something often uploaded. It was like you could see the whole jungle. Google is instead a zoo. (Incidentally, what is the current evolution of gnutella, or any P2P that allows to browse the remote server?)

juangacovas 5y ago
You reminded me The Eye [1], an archive of stuff like that including old software and an overwhelming bunch of non-mainstream and abandoned things [1] https://the-eye.eu/ https://the-eye.eu/
- WallyFunk 5y ago
  > Living without the knowledge of our past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots We need a The Eye for The Eye that backs up The Eye

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) I don't. I am tired of looking up a movie in some service I pay for and getting nothing. It doesn't matter what streaming company I choose, there's always something that just isn't there. Music? If you stray from the mainstream path, you're on your own. Mercifully YouTube is still a respectable repository of music. There are often gaps in the playlists now but what can you do? Back then we had instant access to everything humanity had ever created. The monopolists ruined it all and replaced it with their garbage services.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

There was no algorithm to "guide" your search, there was no limitation, no manipulation. Just you get what you see, and what you get - is all there is. Everything from there, was experience-wise a downgrade.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

TheJoeMan 5y ago

“Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate” It’s not just you. Spotify makes you think “here’s a song similar to the last one” but I’m sure that algorithm is skewed by this record label or that, or the cost per play is cheaper for this one, and it’s not “discovery” anymore but spoonfed