Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

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No, the "normal guy" was downloading Napster and Limewire and 100 other applications from fly-by-night publishers, following folklore suggestions on how to get everything they could for free, getting into messy encounters on Craigslist, visiting independently hosted warez sites, infecting their PC with all kinds of crap, etc, exactly because it was easy and exciting and inviting to do so.

Largely, the most "technically savvy young people" who you're engaging with on HN these days were not doing those things, but were complaining on their many independent and decentralized communities about all the headaches involved in incessantly being brought in to help those people clean up their messes.

Twenty years ago, it was the wild west. Those who had savvy had staked their claims and knew how to survive safely, but the news had made it to everybody else and rails had been laid and all the starry eyed naive people were flooding in to an exciting, if dangerous, new world of novelty and opportunity. It was very different than what we have now, and grossly less consolidated.

Were you by any chance in college 20 years ago?

Absolutely none of this tracks for me, it smacks of someone extrapolating their tiny niche to the entire world.

PS: Limewire was loaded with browser toolbars and malware. The definition of corporate hell.

I was very much not.

And I agree that the uncountably many software publishers of the time were aggressively experimenting with the dark monetization patterns that Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, Amazon and others were soon to refine into what are now only a handful of ~trillion dollar business engines.

Of course there was corporate participation in that era, but following the dot-com boom and its bust, the scale and number of these operations was very different than the small-and-consolidated Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy era of a decade before and equally different than titanic-and-consolidated Facebook/Google/Amazon era a decade later.

Browser toolbars came from shady websites, not limewire. Limewire was for Trojans Source: I was doing amateur mallet research 20 years ago

The official installer literally shipped with ask.com Toolbar.

I was in college even earlier, and living in a third world country to boot.

Every single soul in my class was pirating music online.

Napster was a blip (too early, very few had pcs) and only the tech saavy used it, but Kazaa, Soulseek and Limewire were absolutely huge among my cohort.

Btw I asked German friends my age and pretty much all of them have a similar experience.

Emule. Even the older relatives of my SO knew about it.

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