@cybertoaster
"Ares was a cesspit of malware, edonkey never worked, there were a few napster clones that had better quality files but download speeds were atrocious and users left. Really filesharing only got really good when torrents got traction and there was a short golden age with megaupload and mediafire when you could find literally anything, even corporate software worth more than a used car."
Showing my age here, but I remember starting my online piracy career (after years of copying floppies amongst friends) on BBSes back in the early 90s, when I first found Rusty and Edie's it was like winning the fucking lottery, you could find ANYTHING on there. Now downloading it at 4800 baud was another story, I wasn't lucky enough to have a dedicated phone line just for dial-up so I really only had the overnight hours, but it was awesome none the less.
Then when Napster came out and all of the clones did as well, modem speeds had improved so much over the course of the 90s that you could download actual music. And back when CDs still cost $15 each, that was like hitting the lottery all over again. I still have some files I downloaded back then, that I've kept for almost 25 years now, even though I have copies of the same songs at much better bit rates the nostalgia factor has made me keep them all this time.
And in 2002 I learned about BitTorrent, and found Suprnova.org, your one-stop shop for literally anything that you wanted. I had just gotten a broadband connection and was stunned at the speeds I was getting vs. 56K. Finally pirating video was feasible, and so was pirating big-ticket software. I started amassing a media collection that has continued until today. When Suprnova went down I thought, "Well that was fun while it lasted", but then there was a mass exodus to the Pirate Bay, and for while, until about 2010 or so you could find the most obscure shit on there with no problem. These days torrenting is much more decentralized, and you don't have any trouble finding torrents of new shit, but a lot of stuff is basically gone forever, and I'm really glad that I grabbed some stuff back then that I know I'll never be able to find again.
And as far as software is concerned, I helped a friend get a video production company up and running in 2003, and we probably pirated over $100k of software to help do that. Shake, Maya, Photoshop, Final Cut Studio, 3D Studio Max, and a TON of other shit that I can't remember off the top of my head. If it weren't for piracy, he never would have been able to get started, and he's still in video production 20 years later, and is now a fucking millionaire. You could never do that these days, but to be honest you really wouldn't need to because everything is SaaS now, and the barriers to entry are a lot lower, not to mention that free tools available now are more capable than most of that stuff was back then.
These days, people just watch shit on streams, whether legal or otherwise, which though convenient, just isn't the same as downloading something once and knowing you'll have it forever as long as you don't suffer a hard drive failure. Piracy is still a thing of course, but the golden age of piracy is long gone and I doubt very much if we'll ever see anything like that era ever again.
