this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
1387 points (98.1% liked)
Greentext
7118 readers
368 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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)