Every once in a while I'll try to watch something through the Intended Method™ and it always proves itself to be a worse experience.

Most recent example - I was watching Malcolm in the Middle on Disney+ with my girlfriend, and we found that there are entire audio tracks missing in multiple episodes. Usually some kind of ADR, like someone talking off camera. There's an episode where Reese rents an apartment and there's a recurring bit of him talking to his depressed neighbour through the wall. But you'd have no idea because they somehow completely deleted the neighbour's dialogue from the audio, so it's just Reese having a one-sided conversation with a wall. We saw multiple episodes where something like this happened, and when I looked online there were reports of it dating back years.

Never had an issue like that with torrenting because the people providing it care about the quality, metadata, etc. No one providing official routes to this media seems to care. You have AI-upscaled "4k" movies where the actors don't even look like themselves and there are hallucinated artifacts and things that aren't there. Images cropped to widescreen, like the infamous Duff Beer joke being out of frame in The Simpsons. TV series with edits or entire episodes removed because they were deemed too offensive. Movies and shows randomly appearing and disappearing so you have to endlessly manage subscriptions and switch between different apps with better or worse players just to watch a single series. Just a nightmare.

I haven't visited a torrent site since I found out I could search for them from within qBittorrent.

It's very strange to think about this in the current context. Anything P2P used to be the Anti Christ of the Software Industry. The lengths Microsoft and game vendors went to prevent copying is insane. Installing Windows as well as various Higher End software is a huge pain because of this.

On the other hand Microsoft is very much leading with OpenAI in vacuuming any content, stripping effectively copyright claims.

That being said, nowadays the only use case for me to use Pirate Bay is when I cannot get a movie elsewhere. I'd pay for it but it's not possible - because of copyright...

When it comes to films, I torrent exclusively remuxes or whole Blu-Ray images. TPB hasn't been relevant for me for the last 15 years or more, since it never had a culture of such large file sizes, just small re-encodes. I wonder why, because obviously that data doesn't have to pass through TPB's own servers.

Sometimes feel like I'm the only one still using it around me, but the service is still great and functional

It works great with a nice stremio setup for live streaming. No subscriptions necessary anymore.

Great documentary on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6qcJt2NPY8

All the best stuff doesn’t get licensed by streaming services at all

Entire generations of people have no idea something exists

From "The Pirate Bay down, forever?" (2014)

> TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. Noone willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse.

> As a big fan of the KLF I once learned that it’s great to burn great things up. At least then you can quit while you’re on top. I think I left TPB just a little bit after that top, and not when it’s as shitty as it was when it was closed today. It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it did that. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160712155638/http://blog.broke...

If its not on their top 100/48 hr list then its not worth watching.

The pirate bay raid is a good example of the kind of soft power the US has lost with their recent behavior. Hard to imagine Stockholm police being as receptive nowadays.

edit: I'm very sorry for making a relevant comment that extrapolate on the content of the shared article.

For some reason I thought the pirate bay was like fake/scam urls now. Is that or was that not the case? I thought I was remember the URL constantly changing and it was hard to keep up.

<3 Still a great public tracker. We absolutely need people who will run sites like this and crack and bypass stiff like Denuvo and so on. We really do need to keep these sort of skills, tools, and communities alive to be able to resist digital oppression and techno-fascists. Sounds corny as hell but it's true imo.

So not to hijack this thread or anything but there's one good metric (if nothing else... the fact FB overwrote your email while Google seems to believe in data liberation, and fewer breaches) to tell apart the difference between those two companies

Google had been asked to remove Pirate Bay in results. They didn't. On Google, and I don't really know how it changed over the years, but there'd be a notice about links removed due to DMCA, if it came to that, basically. (Okay, Youtube, which they own, has always been a bit aggressive, and that isn't nothing)

Facebook? Facebook wouldn't let you SEND a link to PB in private messages. It still deletes your post now if you link Anna's Archive. This after apparently heavily scraping LibGen

I don't love Google for a lot of reasons but I damn well feel better using it compared to Mr. "Dumb Fucks"

> For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.

I'm vaguely aware that other people than the original group are running it now.

Also, I don't torrent much, but it seems pretty stagnant and dead. It's been occasionally useful to me to find older stuff that doesn't seem to be well represented on newer (public) sites.

I think the site has been hosted by the police since them. They probably use it as a honeypot or something - except the site is so poorly managed that no one really comes :D