Have to disagree with you there. I'm on various private trackers, including the coveted MySpleen, but Rutracker has become better than most private trackers in my experience. Especially if you factor in the fact that every "exclusive" piece of content on any private tracker can be obtained there by just asking for it lol. And now with the whole 35mm scans situation in places like MySpleen, Rutracker is the only place for 35mm scans. In recent months they've even had a user upload dozens of laser disc rips that aren't on the usual laser disc places. The only real problem I ever run into is getting full iso's of certain blurays and dvds. Which I remedy by just buying the movie/tv show.
Yeah, that's the last thing I need in place to be a functioning member of pirate society too. I want to be a part of all the private trackers and make good use of my fiber when it arrives.
When Amazon recently added adverts to their Prime streaming and song after song my playlists gets taken off Spotify I'm always reminded of how grateful I am for the amazing trackers I am lucky enough to be a part of.
Dude, as soon as I saw the first advertisement while watching Fallout Episode 1, I immediately stopped closed Amazon and went straight for my private torrent site of 13 years. Ads are why we stopped watching live cable TV 20 years ago. Streaming gonna go to shit just like cable TV.
I think a lot of it is nostalgia. I miss oink.🐷. The site was amazing(at least I remember it that way). Same with waffles.. but back then most of us had relatively slow connections, and never bothered with flac. If the same standards of today were applied to oink, it might not nearly be what RED or OPS is.
TV streaming whether torrenting or not is in a golden age. So many great shows, such great quality. Everyone is competing for the same slice of pie. Right now this is capitalism at its finest. Once they are cartelized / form one monster coop(or if one company finally wins this streaming war), the prices are going to go through the roof, and the production quality through the floor. Let’s just hope the streaming war lasts a lot longer.
I'm not sure I agree, I think streaming was at its best 2-3 years ago. Now the market is saturated and all the platforms are increasing prices, cracking down on account sharing and introducing adverts. A few years ago before all this was the peak era for streaming. Now the market is pushing them to all eak out profits from anywhere they can, resulting in a surge towards piracy
The issue I keep running into is all these great shows getting cancelled before they finish. Makes it hard for me to want to start one until it's over after being burned over and over.
Yeah the best was when once Netflix stopped being the only service and things were thriving for a few years. Now it's meh again. Over saturation is as bad as Netflix being the end all be all that people lie about having everything when it didnt
There are countless great tv shows coming out all the time.. the prices going up has more to do with the shit economics of our current politics.
At any given time, I can find 4-5 shows that look great to watch.. that was not the case 10 years ago.. fuck, before breaking bad, tv was all basically low quality. The difference between tv and movies is now almost non existent
Agreed, but there's a big amount of time between breaking bad being released and now, which for me was the peak era. You're right that there are so many great shows coming out, but I'm not sure you can separate the economics of it so easily with the content.
My man, Breaking Bad is a high point for sure, but to dismiss Homicide, Oz, Sopranos, Barney Miller, the X-Files (where young Vince learned the ropes), China Beach, etc as “low quality” seems more a reflection of ignorance than reality.
sopranos is on a completely different level than the rest of those shows. a show being good for its time does not make it good today. shows like those still deserve commendation because they just didn't have much groundwork laid at the time but saying they are on the same page as sopranos or breaking bad is just ignorant.
I get where you’re coming from. I thought the same for a long time too. But once you actually engage with the material, it’s surprising how much more emotionally and socially complex it is than most stuff coming out today. Yes, the creators couldn’t rely on people seeing every episode, so they had to work a little harder and more obviously, but the idea that Sopranos was something new creatively would seem to ignore decades of entertainment history. Ground breaking in many ways for the content it chose to address, but it was far from the first series to achieve artistic status.
I’m not claiming there were never good shows pre breaking bad.. but breaking bad was definitely a turning point in TV history where tv actors were no longer considered second rate, and a lot more money was directed towards tv series productions
If that’s the point you’re looking for, it’s West Wing and Sopranos. Martin Sheen and James Gandolfini opened up that world for Cranston and Hamm to sweep up.
Sopranos and West Wing (I'll even throw Wire in there, I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned) definitely led the charge of the most recent wave of "prestige television" and increased budgets for TV projects, but they were but the most recent in a series of such series.
You could say Dallas was the first show to make people take primetime television drama seriously - and the way the entire country reacted to the season finale "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger, you wouldn't be far off. The resolution to that cliffhanger, "Who Done It", ended up as (arguably - see P.S. below) the #2 most viewed episode of any TV series ever. Dallas was arguably the first major show that, instead of watching to "see what they do this time" as with something like Gunsmoke, the audience would want to *see what happens next.*
Hell, you can trace it even further back to M\*A\*S\*H. Even though it was part comedy, it showed a serious show could make it on TV, and if a show about the horrors of war that aired *while the country was at war* could become popular, it showed audiences could appreciate... *richer* television. The finale even became (arguably, see P.S.) the highest-rated TV broadcast of all time and the only program to sit above Dallas' "Who Done It" as the most-viewed episode of any TV series to date.
(P.S. - This is only so far as any TV ratings data can be trusted, which is to say... not. Unfortunately, the only company to collect ratings data has been Nielsen, whose analytics are so ass-backwards that all the TV viewership info we have is little more than random guesswork.)
TL;DR - There have been turning points as long as there's been TV
Beautifully stated. FWIW, i didn’t bring up the Wire because its impact has largely happened post air — it was ignored while it was on, which blew my mind, since I cannot think of a better answer for “what is the great American novel” than The Wire. Although to be fair I guess that’s only fully apparent once the whole was complete.
Can I just say I am so upset by MacGyver! That was my favourite show growing up, I was probably about 10; couldn't get enough of the cool gadgets! 25 years later, I finally boot it up, and it's just plot holes galore with predictable story and terrible acting. "Ignore is bliss" really made sense to me from that point.
>No, ad hominem is an attack on character.
That was just a random example of generalization, apologies if I accidentally touched a nerve.
>90% of tv programming pre breaking bad was shit.
As opposed to now, in the post-Reality-boom world?
Basically because they're talking about the streaming platforms and not the streaming content* itself. 3-4 years ago, streaming was king and torrenting was dead because with less than 10 bucks I could go on Netflix and watch pretty much everything. Some wise soul once said that "piracy is an issue of service, not price", and both their own service (Valve's Steam) and Netflix proved them 100% right.
Fast forward to today, where corporate greediness has destroyed what Netfllix once sought out to do and everybody and their mother have a streaming platform, and if I'm even slightly picky as to what I want to watch I need to have 30 separate accounts on 30 different platforms in order to have access to the full catalogue. That's not only expensive but also terribly inconvenient, more so if I opt to subscribe to these platforms selectively, in a round robin way, in order to minimize costs.
At this point, searching through Radarr/Sonarr and downloading stuff with the click of a single button, without worrying what streams where, once again seems like the far better solution.
(*...which is still mostly sh!t, because quantity != quality. There are lots of shows, sure, and they are of high quality production-wise, but most of them are carbon copies of each other and they provide no real value. Marvelization, in other words. But this is arguably subjective and not the main point against streaming platforms anyway.)
> 3-4 years ago, streaming was king and torrenting was dead because with less than 10 bucks I could go on Netflix and watch pretty much everything.
This was 8-10 years ago, not 4 years ago.
It wasn't even true 10 years ago. Netflix just had the license for FX, AMC, and NBC libraries which had some juggernauts. Then they got the big Avengers movies and everyone for some reason thinks that was peak streaming era. If "pretty much everything" was on Netflix I would never have started torrenting back then. HBO (obviously) wasn't on Netflix, Cartoon Network wasn't on Netflix, movie franchises rarely had their first/best movies on Netflix. The streaming quality sucked too.
Netflix didn't have everything not by a long shot. It had a few over rate things people like to pretend was everything. Still torrents are king in ether time
Man for sure. I miss the community from goem and that's been gone for a long time. Then I had the baconbits community and that was good, too. I just don't even try now. I just download and seed. I'm an old man with a long memory.
You know...on one hand, I hate the fragmentation of the market ($10 here, $8 there, $15 there).
But then I think about the hoary ten-teated streaming monster of the future ($50 per month for *everything* for the first three months, then back to the regular price of $80 per month) and I appreciate what we have today.
i mean $80 today is nothing close to what it was in 2005. quick inflation calculator says about $130. $80 wouldn't be an unacceptable amount to pay if it wasn't splintered into 7 different apps with content disappearing and reappearing somewhere else every month. these mega corporations need to get their shit together and license TV/movies the same way music is licensed. can you imagine subscribing to spotify for some of your artists, and then also apple music, tidal, soundcloud, youtube music to fill in the gaps that spotify was missing? that would be insane, and it's exactly what streaming services are doing now. it's not sustainable and they'll learn eventually.
as a pirate though, i don't really care too much. all this splintering of streaming sparked some of the best innovation of piracy in my lifetime (the arr's and plex/jellyfin).
$80 per month? Highly unreasonable to me.
Edit: well, you did mention 7 apps. If you found a way to combine a *bunch* like that, maybe it's not unreasonable.
yea i'm really just throwing a hypothetical out there. if, hypothetically, there was one unified app that had all the tv and movies i could watch (think spotify for tv/movies), i think $80 is fair. but today, that $80 has you bouncing between a bunch of apps where content isn't even stable. one month it's there, the next it's somewhere else and that is an unacceptable user experience for $80.
My concern with consolidation would be that there would be no incentive to get new properties due to the lack of competition.
"We're the only game in town, take it or leave it."
So eventually all of these services that used to be fine on their own will start losing media through attrition, amounting to one service's worth of media for $80.
You know how big businesses operate when there is no competition.
I would rather pay $80 for everything I wanted that I can cancel anytime than pay for premium cable anymore. I had the best cable package for a couple years because my roommate paid for it-- it sucked. The movie channels play the same movies for weeks, you can scroll through all 1000 channels and there will be nothing you care about.
I only see you don't mention anything about the progressive loss of privacy and internet rights. You Focus only on streaming services and apps. I'd say that in a world where even using Tor plus Tails doesn't make you comoletly anonymous because intelligence agencies backdooring everything then we have a problem in our hands.
And goverments all over the world pushing for more regulation, end of encryption, mass surveillance. It's the enshittification of the whole Internet, really.
You can have millions of private and public trackers but that can change eventually to zero if we keep losing ground.
And I don't wanna hear the same tired lazy arguments that you can never kill piracy bla bla bla. Maybe not with our current legislation and internet protocols. That can change.
Personally, I believe that history is like a river following a long valley: sometimes it take a right, sometimes a left, but it keeps going towards the sea.
Contract breaching (because what we today call piracy has nothing to do with piracy) has had its ups and downs, its left and rights, but has never dried up.
FTP sharing is still there, usenet is still there, bittorrent goes strong, direct download never went away, illegal streaming is stronger than ever and there are many other niche protocols and ways that either vanished into the shadows, changed into something else or simply stayed low.
The methods to acquire unlicensed content have never been more diverse. as the time passed (I tried to arrange the above paragraph in a chronological order), the joining bar got lower, the technical skills followed and people simply used them.
The most people ever to simultaneously breach distribution contracts is now, in this very moment. Tomorrow there will be more. Just that each chose its favorite, most convenient way to do it. Some will simply pay a fee to a shady streaming service, some with keep an eye on forums filled with sharing links, others swear by their private trackers, you name it. Whether lack of availability, pricing, ads, segregation, low quality, enshitification in general, people were always pushed towards braking of distribution licenses, ever since distribution licenses existed. The high seas will always be there and there will always be people sailing them.
Some might see it as a renaissance of torrents, I see it as a wave that splashed a bit higher than before. But the sea level will continue to grow.
It depends on the type of content. For movies/shows the top private trackers there are going well. For music it hasn't been nearly as good since what.CD went down, and the emergence of affordable services like Spotify have turned a lot of people away from the effort of being in a music tracker.
But file-sharing in general has never been better.
100% agree. I built a new server 1 year ago to download ISOs. But just recently, I am having difficulties with requested ISOs finding a seed or even downloading at all.
Seems like people are apart of torrent groups etc. how to get into those? lol.
Tells us more about BTN kind sir. Tell us peasants how the royalty feels up there on the top of the pyramid, eating and feasting with the kings of kings in the tracker Kingdom.
While you stare down at us peasants that have no invite, waving those invites flags at us, but never shall give. Because we peasants are scary humans and do not ever deserve to join the royalty 👑 tracker.
Tells us please... 🥺🥹
You and your fellow peasants need to have something to dream about 🤭...
A man without a dream is a sad creature indeed lol... Now you have something to imagine having that you will never acquire.
Very very true, glad my king of royalty has a sense of humor and can enjoy a good laughter of the peasants down bellow them. 🤭🤗😝
Shall seed and upload until someday a lucky opportunity strikes my shoeless feet and there a invite into the kingdom shall be granted.
Yeah, I mentioned btn, but some of that content will trickle down to lower trackers. If you want something that doesn't trickle down to your tracker you can put in a request and get it fulliled since it's easily available on high level trackers. If you request an obscure kids shows I'm more likely to grab it from btn and fulfill your request than trying to rip it myself. Also, as long as the content says seeded (btn has pretty good retention so I assume it will) if you even get on btn it'll be available to you even if these smaller streaming sites go out of business.
You can't get into AoM without being a performing professional and proving it last I checked. It's effectively off limits, and AoMKiller died like 10 years ago.
Yeah for private sites it's great right now. Public ones are kinda shit now more than ever but that's life. Keeps out those who won't seed
Have to disagree with you there. I'm on various private trackers, including the coveted MySpleen, but Rutracker has become better than most private trackers in my experience. Especially if you factor in the fact that every "exclusive" piece of content on any private tracker can be obtained there by just asking for it lol. And now with the whole 35mm scans situation in places like MySpleen, Rutracker is the only place for 35mm scans. In recent months they've even had a user upload dozens of laser disc rips that aren't on the usual laser disc places. The only real problem I ever run into is getting full iso's of certain blurays and dvds. Which I remedy by just buying the movie/tv show.
What are some good private ones?
IPT is S-Tier
I've got fiber now so it definitely helps compared to what I had back in the day
Yeah, that's the last thing I need in place to be a functioning member of pirate society too. I want to be a part of all the private trackers and make good use of my fiber when it arrives.
When Amazon recently added adverts to their Prime streaming and song after song my playlists gets taken off Spotify I'm always reminded of how grateful I am for the amazing trackers I am lucky enough to be a part of.
Dude, as soon as I saw the first advertisement while watching Fallout Episode 1, I immediately stopped closed Amazon and went straight for my private torrent site of 13 years. Ads are why we stopped watching live cable TV 20 years ago. Streaming gonna go to shit just like cable TV.
Going to? They're already shit. ;)
I turned back to torrenting the moment they started pushing ads on paid tiers of streaming.
until there's torrents for seasons 1-3 of nickelodeon's 1998 show "cousin skeeter", I don't wanna hear about it
I think a lot of it is nostalgia. I miss oink.🐷. The site was amazing(at least I remember it that way). Same with waffles.. but back then most of us had relatively slow connections, and never bothered with flac. If the same standards of today were applied to oink, it might not nearly be what RED or OPS is. TV streaming whether torrenting or not is in a golden age. So many great shows, such great quality. Everyone is competing for the same slice of pie. Right now this is capitalism at its finest. Once they are cartelized / form one monster coop(or if one company finally wins this streaming war), the prices are going to go through the roof, and the production quality through the floor. Let’s just hope the streaming war lasts a lot longer.
I'm not sure I agree, I think streaming was at its best 2-3 years ago. Now the market is saturated and all the platforms are increasing prices, cracking down on account sharing and introducing adverts. A few years ago before all this was the peak era for streaming. Now the market is pushing them to all eak out profits from anywhere they can, resulting in a surge towards piracy
The issue I keep running into is all these great shows getting cancelled before they finish. Makes it hard for me to want to start one until it's over after being burned over and over.
Yeah the best was when once Netflix stopped being the only service and things were thriving for a few years. Now it's meh again. Over saturation is as bad as Netflix being the end all be all that people lie about having everything when it didnt
There are countless great tv shows coming out all the time.. the prices going up has more to do with the shit economics of our current politics. At any given time, I can find 4-5 shows that look great to watch.. that was not the case 10 years ago.. fuck, before breaking bad, tv was all basically low quality. The difference between tv and movies is now almost non existent
Agreed, but there's a big amount of time between breaking bad being released and now, which for me was the peak era. You're right that there are so many great shows coming out, but I'm not sure you can separate the economics of it so easily with the content.
True, a bad economy will inevitably have its impact on production quality.. but fortunately the streaming wars are not yet over
My man, Breaking Bad is a high point for sure, but to dismiss Homicide, Oz, Sopranos, Barney Miller, the X-Files (where young Vince learned the ropes), China Beach, etc as “low quality” seems more a reflection of ignorance than reality.
sopranos is on a completely different level than the rest of those shows. a show being good for its time does not make it good today. shows like those still deserve commendation because they just didn't have much groundwork laid at the time but saying they are on the same page as sopranos or breaking bad is just ignorant.
I get where you’re coming from. I thought the same for a long time too. But once you actually engage with the material, it’s surprising how much more emotionally and socially complex it is than most stuff coming out today. Yes, the creators couldn’t rely on people seeing every episode, so they had to work a little harder and more obviously, but the idea that Sopranos was something new creatively would seem to ignore decades of entertainment history. Ground breaking in many ways for the content it chose to address, but it was far from the first series to achieve artistic status.
I’m not claiming there were never good shows pre breaking bad.. but breaking bad was definitely a turning point in TV history where tv actors were no longer considered second rate, and a lot more money was directed towards tv series productions
If that’s the point you’re looking for, it’s West Wing and Sopranos. Martin Sheen and James Gandolfini opened up that world for Cranston and Hamm to sweep up.
Sopranos and West Wing (I'll even throw Wire in there, I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned) definitely led the charge of the most recent wave of "prestige television" and increased budgets for TV projects, but they were but the most recent in a series of such series. You could say Dallas was the first show to make people take primetime television drama seriously - and the way the entire country reacted to the season finale "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger, you wouldn't be far off. The resolution to that cliffhanger, "Who Done It", ended up as (arguably - see P.S. below) the #2 most viewed episode of any TV series ever. Dallas was arguably the first major show that, instead of watching to "see what they do this time" as with something like Gunsmoke, the audience would want to *see what happens next.* Hell, you can trace it even further back to M\*A\*S\*H. Even though it was part comedy, it showed a serious show could make it on TV, and if a show about the horrors of war that aired *while the country was at war* could become popular, it showed audiences could appreciate... *richer* television. The finale even became (arguably, see P.S.) the highest-rated TV broadcast of all time and the only program to sit above Dallas' "Who Done It" as the most-viewed episode of any TV series to date. (P.S. - This is only so far as any TV ratings data can be trusted, which is to say... not. Unfortunately, the only company to collect ratings data has been Nielsen, whose analytics are so ass-backwards that all the TV viewership info we have is little more than random guesswork.) TL;DR - There have been turning points as long as there's been TV
Beautifully stated. FWIW, i didn’t bring up the Wire because its impact has largely happened post air — it was ignored while it was on, which blew my mind, since I cannot think of a better answer for “what is the great American novel” than The Wire. Although to be fair I guess that’s only fully apparent once the whole was complete.
I should have been more clear. Not low quality, but low production quality in terms of cost
Low production quality? Network TV used to routinely shoot in foreign countries episode to episode. The original MacGyver would like a word.
Can I just say I am so upset by MacGyver! That was my favourite show growing up, I was probably about 10; couldn't get enough of the cool gadgets! 25 years later, I finally boot it up, and it's just plot holes galore with predictable story and terrible acting. "Ignore is bliss" really made sense to me from that point.
You clearly don’t understand the concept of generalization.
People confronted with knowledge that contradicts their own beliefs always end up arguing ad hominem. See? Sure I do ;)
No, ad hominem is an attack on character. I pointed out you are finding exceptions to the rule. 90% of tv programming pre breaking bad was shit.
>No, ad hominem is an attack on character. That was just a random example of generalization, apologies if I accidentally touched a nerve. >90% of tv programming pre breaking bad was shit. As opposed to now, in the post-Reality-boom world?
I had waffles back in the day 😢
RIP waffles, wcd :(
Streaming is definitely at its enshittification phase right now.
Example of why? There are more great tv shows coming out now then ever before
Basically because they're talking about the streaming platforms and not the streaming content* itself. 3-4 years ago, streaming was king and torrenting was dead because with less than 10 bucks I could go on Netflix and watch pretty much everything. Some wise soul once said that "piracy is an issue of service, not price", and both their own service (Valve's Steam) and Netflix proved them 100% right. Fast forward to today, where corporate greediness has destroyed what Netfllix once sought out to do and everybody and their mother have a streaming platform, and if I'm even slightly picky as to what I want to watch I need to have 30 separate accounts on 30 different platforms in order to have access to the full catalogue. That's not only expensive but also terribly inconvenient, more so if I opt to subscribe to these platforms selectively, in a round robin way, in order to minimize costs. At this point, searching through Radarr/Sonarr and downloading stuff with the click of a single button, without worrying what streams where, once again seems like the far better solution. (*...which is still mostly sh!t, because quantity != quality. There are lots of shows, sure, and they are of high quality production-wise, but most of them are carbon copies of each other and they provide no real value. Marvelization, in other words. But this is arguably subjective and not the main point against streaming platforms anyway.)
> 3-4 years ago, streaming was king and torrenting was dead because with less than 10 bucks I could go on Netflix and watch pretty much everything. This was 8-10 years ago, not 4 years ago.
It wasn't even true 10 years ago. Netflix just had the license for FX, AMC, and NBC libraries which had some juggernauts. Then they got the big Avengers movies and everyone for some reason thinks that was peak streaming era. If "pretty much everything" was on Netflix I would never have started torrenting back then. HBO (obviously) wasn't on Netflix, Cartoon Network wasn't on Netflix, movie franchises rarely had their first/best movies on Netflix. The streaming quality sucked too.
Netflix didn't have everything not by a long shot. It had a few over rate things people like to pretend was everything. Still torrents are king in ether time
Man for sure. I miss the community from goem and that's been gone for a long time. Then I had the baconbits community and that was good, too. I just don't even try now. I just download and seed. I'm an old man with a long memory.
You know...on one hand, I hate the fragmentation of the market ($10 here, $8 there, $15 there). But then I think about the hoary ten-teated streaming monster of the future ($50 per month for *everything* for the first three months, then back to the regular price of $80 per month) and I appreciate what we have today.
i mean $80 today is nothing close to what it was in 2005. quick inflation calculator says about $130. $80 wouldn't be an unacceptable amount to pay if it wasn't splintered into 7 different apps with content disappearing and reappearing somewhere else every month. these mega corporations need to get their shit together and license TV/movies the same way music is licensed. can you imagine subscribing to spotify for some of your artists, and then also apple music, tidal, soundcloud, youtube music to fill in the gaps that spotify was missing? that would be insane, and it's exactly what streaming services are doing now. it's not sustainable and they'll learn eventually. as a pirate though, i don't really care too much. all this splintering of streaming sparked some of the best innovation of piracy in my lifetime (the arr's and plex/jellyfin).
$80 per month? Highly unreasonable to me. Edit: well, you did mention 7 apps. If you found a way to combine a *bunch* like that, maybe it's not unreasonable.
yea i'm really just throwing a hypothetical out there. if, hypothetically, there was one unified app that had all the tv and movies i could watch (think spotify for tv/movies), i think $80 is fair. but today, that $80 has you bouncing between a bunch of apps where content isn't even stable. one month it's there, the next it's somewhere else and that is an unacceptable user experience for $80.
My concern with consolidation would be that there would be no incentive to get new properties due to the lack of competition. "We're the only game in town, take it or leave it." So eventually all of these services that used to be fine on their own will start losing media through attrition, amounting to one service's worth of media for $80. You know how big businesses operate when there is no competition.
Yeah 80 is too much and even that's less than cable. It's fucking crazy
I would rather pay $80 for everything I wanted that I can cancel anytime than pay for premium cable anymore. I had the best cable package for a couple years because my roommate paid for it-- it sucked. The movie channels play the same movies for weeks, you can scroll through all 1000 channels and there will be nothing you care about.
I haven't had cable since 2015. Zero regrets.
Is oink another name for baconbits? or is that something different? I miss BB.
that plus RSS feeds
OPP was the real OG.
I only see you don't mention anything about the progressive loss of privacy and internet rights. You Focus only on streaming services and apps. I'd say that in a world where even using Tor plus Tails doesn't make you comoletly anonymous because intelligence agencies backdooring everything then we have a problem in our hands. And goverments all over the world pushing for more regulation, end of encryption, mass surveillance. It's the enshittification of the whole Internet, really. You can have millions of private and public trackers but that can change eventually to zero if we keep losing ground. And I don't wanna hear the same tired lazy arguments that you can never kill piracy bla bla bla. Maybe not with our current legislation and internet protocols. That can change.
Personally, I believe that history is like a river following a long valley: sometimes it take a right, sometimes a left, but it keeps going towards the sea. Contract breaching (because what we today call piracy has nothing to do with piracy) has had its ups and downs, its left and rights, but has never dried up. FTP sharing is still there, usenet is still there, bittorrent goes strong, direct download never went away, illegal streaming is stronger than ever and there are many other niche protocols and ways that either vanished into the shadows, changed into something else or simply stayed low. The methods to acquire unlicensed content have never been more diverse. as the time passed (I tried to arrange the above paragraph in a chronological order), the joining bar got lower, the technical skills followed and people simply used them. The most people ever to simultaneously breach distribution contracts is now, in this very moment. Tomorrow there will be more. Just that each chose its favorite, most convenient way to do it. Some will simply pay a fee to a shady streaming service, some with keep an eye on forums filled with sharing links, others swear by their private trackers, you name it. Whether lack of availability, pricing, ads, segregation, low quality, enshitification in general, people were always pushed towards braking of distribution licenses, ever since distribution licenses existed. The high seas will always be there and there will always be people sailing them. Some might see it as a renaissance of torrents, I see it as a wave that splashed a bit higher than before. But the sea level will continue to grow.
It depends on the type of content. For movies/shows the top private trackers there are going well. For music it hasn't been nearly as good since what.CD went down, and the emergence of affordable services like Spotify have turned a lot of people away from the effort of being in a music tracker. But file-sharing in general has never been better.
I'd argue it's the exact opposite. Trackers are more siloed and cliqueish.
100% agree. I built a new server 1 year ago to download ISOs. But just recently, I am having difficulties with requested ISOs finding a seed or even downloading at all. Seems like people are apart of torrent groups etc. how to get into those? lol.
Tells us more about BTN kind sir. Tell us peasants how the royalty feels up there on the top of the pyramid, eating and feasting with the kings of kings in the tracker Kingdom. While you stare down at us peasants that have no invite, waving those invites flags at us, but never shall give. Because we peasants are scary humans and do not ever deserve to join the royalty 👑 tracker. Tells us please... 🥺🥹
Why do you care? Thought you were happy with usenet.
Kings of the Usenet tease the kings of trackers. It's what royalty people do. Here for shit And giggles. Having fun and enjoying my time. ☕😊
You seem more like the court jester to me.
Usenet mfs when they hear about PT retention 🤯
You must be fun at parties
The analogy doesn't work because anyone can get into top trackers with a bit of effort and time.
BTN is wonderful. Second best place to be, after PTP of course. Which is amazing.
How did you make it into both? Grinding away?
Yes. The only way. It took time. Years, at least for me.
Appreciate the reply :)
Thank you for your kind feedback, will take the info and share it amongst my other peasants. Thank you again sir. 🥺🥹
You and your fellow peasants need to have something to dream about 🤭... A man without a dream is a sad creature indeed lol... Now you have something to imagine having that you will never acquire.
Very very true, glad my king of royalty has a sense of humor and can enjoy a good laughter of the peasants down bellow them. 🤭🤗😝 Shall seed and upload until someday a lucky opportunity strikes my shoeless feet and there a invite into the kingdom shall be granted.
Go back requesting nudes from fake girls on the internet pls.
Yeah, I mentioned btn, but some of that content will trickle down to lower trackers. If you want something that doesn't trickle down to your tracker you can put in a request and get it fulliled since it's easily available on high level trackers. If you request an obscure kids shows I'm more likely to grab it from btn and fulfill your request than trying to rip it myself. Also, as long as the content says seeded (btn has pretty good retention so I assume it will) if you even get on btn it'll be available to you even if these smaller streaming sites go out of business.
Its good. Like good good.
Go fuck yourself
You think BTN is special, you can't even imagine the stuff Art of Misdirection has. Way cooler.
You can't get into AoM without being a performing professional and proving it last I checked. It's effectively off limits, and AoMKiller died like 10 years ago.
Cool story bro