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Comment by 1970-01-01 | Hacker News Reader

1970-01-01

Nobody has the audacity to mention The Pirate Bay. Ethical and moral issues aside, it was and arguably still is a 10x method for obtaining digital content and software.

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In a similar vein, Napster was also a game changer for mp3 distribution.

Kazaa

The only problem I had with Kazaa is how often people would rename files for reasons I'll never understand.

Like...imagine downloading "The Matrix.avi", and you start playing it, and it turns out it was actually a copy of Fight Club.

WHY!?

For the same reason trolls are everywhere: because they can :/

A large chunk of the internet exists for the lulz. Imagine having to postpone your phone calls for an entire weekend in order to download a 1GB copy of Final Fantasy 7 on a crappy 32 kbps dial-up connection, only to open up the game and realize you got Leisure Suit Larry 6.

I was lucky enough that we had a second phone line dedicated to the modem.

One thing I liked about Napster and the like is that bootlegs and B-sides circulated along with the official releases. I miss not having these on Spotify. Yes, there are official live albums on there. And yes, you can still find these bootlegs elsewhere. But there's enough friction that I rarely do this.

Yeah, Napster's value still hasn't been replaced in full. I remember pulling some obscure song from another endpoint halfway around the planet and then being able to browse their music collection, which turned me on to other cool music. You can kind of do the same thing on spotify by following people and playlists, but it's not the same discovery magic that Napster had, especially for obscure or hyper-local stuff. I'm not enough of a music nerd anymore to care as much these days, but Napster really was the cat's venerable pj's back then.

I'm pretty sure there were servers out there taking incoming search strings and slapping them on the end of file names. You could search for RANDOM_STRING and find a "britney spears matrix hot babes unsavory search (2)(1)RANDOM_STRING.mov.wmv.exe"

For me napster was a game changer that got me into music period. Before that discovering and learning what music I liked was tedious and low signal/noise along with high cost that I never developed any interest in music until napster existed.

Got me into computers really. I didn’t “get” the internet prior to Napster. It felt like a toy with no real value. But I was a teenager at the time and the access to music was a game changer. I was hoarding so much content I had to learn how to build my own systems and storage solutions. I used to download video content (music videos, live concerts, etc) from IRC too around this time.

Pirate Bay, Napster, Limewire etc. are what dragged us into the digital media age. Might not seem like it today but had studios and record companies had their way, Netflix or Spotify would not exist.

True, but Spotify was another 10x improvement. You click on ANY song, and, WELL under 1 second later, you are listening to that song. Closer to a quarter of a second. In 2010 or so, when I first used it.

But was it a 10x improvement on Grooveshark at the time? I went from Grooveshark, to Google Music, and finally to Spotify in around 2018

BitTorrent too the underlying protocol with less nonsense than download sites that often want to tease you in to a paid subscription. Torrents are as good as it gets but malware and pretend movies linking to the aforementioned sites are sometimes a problem

And libgen/scihub for ebooks

Limewire

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