I don’t think the facts match the claim, but I completely agree with the sentiment.
For years, the ‘legit’ consumer has had to deal with ad interruptions and bad UI and service disruptions and having media removed from their library. Something that pirates don’t even have to think about. The music revolution that Jobs and Apple created with iTunes, which allowed people to just buy music and just own it and just use it however they want (no DRM) with an ease that made piracy look difficult and seem too risky to bother, never came for TV or movies or books or any other media category.
And now the streaming revolution has all but undone that progress as well. You don’t own anything, a company decides when you have or lose access to something, and even if you pay money for access you are still advertised to and your data is still sold off.
I remember iTunes only letting you change computer like 2-3 times max before the drm would make mysic not work any more, but maybe it was no-drm in the beginning.
I had a chinese 1GB shuffle though so IDK if that's correct.
The chinese shuffle also doubled up as a usb key (very useful back then) and also didn't need iTunes to function smh.
Yeah IIRC you're right, though I remember you could contact apple and reset it.
It was called FairPlay DRM and they only really got rid of it around a decade after iTunes launched. I'm not 100% but I think I had to pay to upgrade my already paid-for library to DRM free too
It may have originally had DRM but it doesn’t now.
That didn't last very long.
Yeah this guy is on some Apple fanboy shit if he thinks iTunes was drm free. Their shitty design for iTunes and decision to force you to use it despite it making the experience of listening to music much worse is the primary reason an ipod is the only Apple device I've ever owned. Freedom of choice and Apple have never mixed. That's such a weird angle to take when describing them.
But then later for like $10 I could take all my pirate music, legitimize it, and download a copy from iTunes if theirs was better quality. That was nice.
Edit: iTunes Match
Meanwhile, in a dark and forgotten corner of my PC, I STILL have several thousand MP3s I downloaded from Kazaa back in the day.
Ads you say?
I'll have to take your word for it...
I feel like most of the kind of people who go out of their way to pirate also go out of their way to avoid ads.
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It indiscriminately pollutes whatever environment it’s conducted within, and causes secondary harm to non-participants by incentivising hoarding of PII in the cheapest and least secure manner.
It causes genuine harm, I'm visually impaired and I've wandered into construction zones because advertising billboards are mounted near and "road work ahead" signs and everything is all just bright and bold.
I don't know what's official, everything is competing for my attention but I have very little capacity to dedicate my full attention to a visual sign. The end result is incredibly fatiguing, seeing a bright sign and straining to ensure I read it because it's colours look important, nope, it's an ad, that was a waste of energy, oh look another one with the same blurry colours and type setting it's probably the same ad.... Nope that one actually needed my attention, and now I'm somewhere I shouldn't be and I'm in danger.
I'm also hard of hearing, but fortunately audio adber in the public isn't as bad, but anyone who's hearing impaired knows how fatiguing it is to try and filter through noise. It's the exact same for visual impairment.
Depends on the piracy site. If you go to some of the pirate streaming sites or the blogs that host tons of pirated software with 30 rapidgator links that die after a month (instead of just using a torrent like a normal sensible person trying to share a 2-30+gb file that is begging to be taken down) without Adblock it’s absolutely comical how many ads there are. Even with Adblock those are the sites that manage to still have ads because they’re on the cutting edge of sketchy shit. It’s like seeing a late 90s to early 2000s website with how much random bullshit is pasted everywhere
Despite that I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
I’m pretty sure that Amazon, google, etc do far more nefarious shit behind the scenes in terms of tracking/fingerprinting you and collecting data to sell
You even get to pay more and more for this privilege…smh
This is all spanish (as in castilian) media. The torrents are sparse and usually really badly encoded, I'm talking stuff like AVI codec in media produced in 2024.
There's a better chance if you try to find it in the open with those sketchy links you mention or you are "lucky enough" to get invited to a Telegram group that has it uploaded to the platform, severed in hundreds of multipart files.
I've seen more Spanish people using the outdated Ed2K protocol through a/eMule rather than torrents even, it's so depressing.
Bless MySpleen, OR, AR, and AT! Ain’t no ads nowhere no way
Once ads are allowed into a platform they will ultimately be what destroys it eventually.
Might take a week or a decade. But the lust of that easy ad money will ruin the thing they were put there to fund in the end.
I don't think that's necessarily true - maybe it depends on (a) the owners of the platform and/or (b) whether there are sources of funding besides advertising
E.g. here in the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 are both broadcasters owned by the government, and both are funded at least in part by adverts. But I think both of them are relatively healthy and aren't on the brink of destroying themselves.
I think most of the BBC's funding comes from the licence fee (British people pay for a TV licence) but they make some money from ads shown to international audiences. Channel 4 is solely funded by adverts I think, but it's owned by the government and I think they have to abide by certain rules and targets.
Panics while using Boost to view this post
laughs in pi-hole blocking in-app ads
ublock origin. I don't care if some website dies. Whole internet is turning to shit anyways, just let it all burn
Ublock does such a good job at blocking the old janky torrent sites, especially compared to the increasingly aggressive and intrusive new shit.
I'd love it if we started the internet from scratch again with no search engines, just webrings and link books and geocities pages everywhere
We should also bring back the LiveJournal days as well. I was too young to ever really be able to get into that kinda stuff, but I've been enjoying writing posts for my 100% fictional company on InsaneJournal, no matter how little, if any, people see it.
neocities!
Whats a piracy site? Theres zero ads in the search window on qbittorrent…
Where you find the torrents
qittorrent has a search function where you input and save the associated plug-in/address of the torrent site/feed you want and then you can just search within qbittorrent for whatever torrent you are looking for and select whatever you want for download without having to go to an website or another app/protocol.
Much like the twenty minutes of unskippable ads on commercial DVDs, the media companies and social media will enshittify until the general public turns to piracy.
Essentially, the sooner we all come to terms with piracy being
acceptablenecessary, the sooner they let off on their enshittification efforts.And yet I see 0 ads in either of those sites.
There are in the videos as sponsors for a lot of channels on YouTube, and as sponsored results on Amazon
Tbh I don’t care about the sponsor segments in videos. It’s actually my favorite way of advertising, as I can skip it or watch the funny ones (tomska does really funny - although slightly incorrect - segments).
But boy do I hate sponsored results on Amazon or similar platforms. I feel like I have to search through them to get to the actual products, and then I can’t trust the reviews
SponsorBlock takes care of the sponsored segments in youtube videos. There are addons for blocking sponsored search results on amazon too.
Ad revenue is like Crack to corporations. Once they get a taste for it, it's all downhill from there.
Mostly because it's the easiest money they'll ever make and it's more profitable than subscription models. Gotta see those numbers go up at all costs.
Corporations like google and amazon damage the market and the industry more than "piracy" does
I have legit never bought a single thing because I saw and ad for said product. I don’t know who is out here making these campaigns so profitable
Brand awareness gets you subconsciously
I dunno, I don't just ignore ads, I find them repulsive, like my scam-alarms go off even when I know that it's probably a legit product. Seriously unless I get a recommendation from an actual person, the brand I've never heard of feels safer to me then the brand I saw a cheap ad for on some janky website. Maybe it's because so much of the stuff I had growing up was knockoff/store brand, so I've hardly ever actually experienced anything that I saw an ad for.
Here's a really horrifying fact about ads, they don't expect you to go right out and buy their product. Ads target your subconscious and manipulate your way of thinking. There was a study done by some university and tested by a few people across different fields of study that proved this to be correct. I wish I could remember off the top of my head where this was published. If you do a little browsing you can probably find it and you should because you can't trust a stranger like me to properly relay the information.
Adblock my beloved
Not the way I use legit sites!
Jokes aside, I agree and I hate it
Besides streaming, i.e. the capability to watch the movies and series when you want and how much you want, and lowering the entry to produce videos for more people, they pretty much reinvented cable. Or did I miss something substantial?
They're already consolidating in streaming services that bundle content packs.
You know I was just thinking this the other day, and they are just as intrusive as the ones that piracy sites have
What do you mean as intrusive, none of the piracy sites are trying to work around my adblocker.
After Amazon said there'd be more ads recently, yep, more ads tonight. Done with it. My living room is not a marketing platform. It's finally time to go back to the convenience and ease of piracy.
The new model is based around pirating Clarkson's Farm and donating to farmers. That's the point anyway. No need to bring Jeff into it.
That’s normal, it’s the same infrastructure cost then the licensing costs
People upload whole MasterChef seasons on Youtube. Legit
That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.
The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.
Sorry, what exactly kind of content are we talking about? You know, the one "legit" sites have to pay for but piracy sites don't.
Fun fact: a lot of the content you see on big sites are advertorials, this means some company writes a fluff piece about how their lastest product can solve all your problems, and then pays the site to publish it. In print, you even have the option to have the ad use the same layout, fonts, colors etc. as the real content.
This means a portion of a site is not filled by content that had to be bought, but actually brings them money.
Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?
Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.
Not at all true
edit: oh piracy streaming sites. Probably true for that. I wouldn't know.
Somehow "legit" sites won't try to install malware on my laptop. So, I take more regular ads over piracy crap.
You've never seen a DNS poisoning attack have ya? I've seen Google infect systems just because they looked up a particular football game, because some bad actor somehow poisoned the DNS cache.
So no, "legit" sites aren't always safe either.
Who gets malware in 2024? Lol what
I remember my first time on the internet
Edit: Ublock Origin, Sponsorblock, Violent Monkey with anti script and ad block blocker scripts. Countdown bypass, autoclick skip ad and shortlink scripts, and what ever other specific scripts for your needs
I decided to be helpful for others instead of just a smart ass. Not you OP, you have it coming for spreading misinformation
Ah no, most "malware" is just false positive of AV software, since repacked games look pretty similiar. And no such dangers with media files, as long as your system is uptodate.
Wasn't there statistics a while ago already, that most malware comes from "legit" sites, especially newspapers (malvertising), by quite a margin? Hard to find now, too much noise.
Not to say you don't need to be careful. But not much more than always with executing something from the internet.
One rule of thumb: torrent sites usually have a colorful pirate skull things for torrents from reputable groups (if not, look for a better site). They have a reputation to lose if malware gets slipped in. And they do what they do mostly for reputation and competition.
Edit: found this, SO had maintenance today.
