12 ms·

Bold prediction: if ads on paid streaming services become the norm, there will be a renaissance of piracy because it will once again offer the superior user exp

by jupp0r 4y ago

Bold prediction: if ads on paid streaming services become the norm, there will be a renaissance of piracy because it will once again offer the superior user experience.

saiya-jin 4y ago
it never stopped being a superior experience for many types of users and many locations
MichaelCollins 4y ago
It's inevitable. Paying for cable TV was once pitched to the American public as a reprieve from ads. Now, virtually all cable TV channels have more ads than than broadcast television had in the first place.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Well its inevitable to have an ad-tier and an ad-free tier at least. One of the benefits of digital ads v. linear TV ads.
  - Msw242 4y ago
    What do you do when you find out that you make more per ad-tier user than you do for ad-free user[0]? The incentives go in the wrong direction from a UX perspective [0] https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/hulu-makes-about-15-in-revenue-per-customer-every-month/ https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/hulu-makes-about-15-in-reven...
    - smeyer 4y ago
      Can the answer not just be to charge more for the ad-free tier? The gap between what I'm willing to pay for a streaming service with and without ads is a lot more than what the current going rate is.
      - moreira 4y ago
        The problem is that if you increase the price too much, the bad PR and hit to your reputation will likely offset any extra revenue. If a service like Hulu released a $50/mo ad-free tier people would freak out, even if they still had access to the same free ad-tier experience they do now. I don't know that it'd be beneficial.
      - lp0_on_fire 4y ago
        This is boiling the frog though? These services were sold to us as something without ads. Seems really mob-like for the services to say to me: pay more or we're going to start showing ads on the thing we sold to you with the promise you wouldn't have any ads. Rinse and repeat another year later.
        smeyer 4y ago
        I don't think that's particularly a problem. Just because Netflix or Hulu offered one service when I first used them a decade ago doesn't mean they're obliged to provide the same service at the same price forever. I occasionally cancel a streaming service if I decide that it's no longer providing enough value to me, just like I'd cancel my current subscriptions if they started adding ads.
      - Msw242 4y ago
        Because raising prices doesn't necessarily increase revenue.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      They'll just make the ad free price higher or the ads more obnoxious (or turn the ad free tier into a slightly less ads tier)
- scarface74 4y ago
  Why does this meme always come up in any discussion when it only takes a little bit of research (if you aren’t old enough to remember) to know this was never true? Cable TV was first pitched as a method to get broadcast TV - with ads - in places that couldn’t get broadcast. Cable companies put big towers up and rebroadcasted network TV - with ads. Then HBO came along as an ad free premium channel and it still is. Then the “Superstations” like TBS out of Atlanta came along. Which were always ad supported and started broadcasting nationally. Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA. Not only dud they have ads from day one, they had infomercials to fill out the time when they didn’t have programming to show. There has never been a time since the invention of cable TV in the US that it was ad free.
  - thakoppno 4y ago
    Thanks for mentioning this. I’ll admit I believed the meme. From a 1981 NYT article > Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - squeaky-clean 4y ago
    > Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA. MTV was actually a ripoff of QUBE channel C-1 program "Sight on Sound" which didn't air advertisements the way we think of them. Instead record labels could pay to have their music videos prioritized or to run giveaway contests. QUBE also lead to the creation of Nickelodeon (Which itself was ad-free for several years). QUBE channel C-3 "Pinwheel" was the first cable channel made for only young children, and was spun off into Nickelodeon when QUBE went defunct. The QUBE T channels were just cable links to conventional OTA broadcast television channels (T for television). QUBE C channels (C for community) did not have ad breaks. Instead there would be sponsored giveaways or sponsored shows which eventually lead to the current practice of infomercials. Except with QUBE the segments were live and viewers could push one of 5 buttons on the remote to interact with the program. For example in a sponsored cosmetics segment viewers could vote on whether the next topic would be one of 5 options, lipstick, mascara, etc. Sight on Sound would ask some questions about current viewer demographics (are you male/female. Are you in age group ABCDE. How many people are watching right now), the dj would say it was to play music matching the current demographic, but it was mainly collected to give metrics to sponsored segments or to wait for an appropriate time to play a sponsored segment. But what most urban people considered "cable" at the time would be the QUBE P-channels. P for Pay. Unlike other pay channels at the time like HBO, the P channels were a monthly subscription (each), not pay per view. Notably, QUBE got into the news several times because of channel P-10, which aired softcore porn. Also ESPN did not initially air advertisements during programming, only in between programs. But they also only had sports no one really cared about for the first few years. No major sports, no college games. But they did have highlights and some international sports. https://youtu.be/7Fz1bSViIZw https://youtu.be/7Fz1bSViIZw The main reason early cable-only channels didn't have advertising is mainly because the subscriber numbers were so small there wasn't much revenue to be made targeting 5-10k viewers. Once subscriber numbers went up, and higher budget programming was in-demand (sports licensing is ridiculously expensive) ad breaks similar to OTA channels were introduced. But many of cable's early adopters bought into it on word of mouth, and word at the time was "no ad breaks!" It wasn't a goal of cable TV, just a side effect of the development. It was only a few years, but there were a few years when cable tv had no ad breaks for the majority of urban subscribers. It's sort of like someone saying Netflix used to have pretty much every show and movie, and then pulling up stats from 2014 and beyond saying no they didn't.
msoad 4y ago
Honestly I'm already off most of streaming services and use put.io for everything, including services that I'm already paying for. The home page that pushes garbage to my mind is another reason I'm avoiding those services. I want to watch things that I mindfully picked.
_trackno5 4y ago
I have to disagree with you. Coming from a country where media consumption used the be expensive, the reason people pirated entertainment was mainly due to cost. Not because it was inconvenient to see an ad. Streaming will still be miles more convenient than piracy. All I have to do is turn on my apple tv, grab the remote and watch whatever I want, whenever I want. I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv. You don't have to do that these days, either. There's software out there that will happily keep tabs on your favorite shows and films and download them as soon as they're available via torrent/newsgroup/etc., and then drop it directly into Plex, Kodi, or wherever, automagically. Just like streaming, but without the cost.
  - synu 4y ago
    It will even download as you watch if you want to watch something without a delay.
  - runjake 4y ago
    What might be some of the better software that does this? So I can avoid them, of course.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      Radarr and Sonarr; stay away from them!
      - runjake 4y ago
        Thank you for responding, I definitely will.
- monetus 4y ago
  I have access to apple TV, the service, but it is easier for me to use Kodi on a raspberry pi to watch it. Make of that what you will. I know there needs to be a hub for all of the streaming services, and the options seem imperfect in one significant way or another.
somehnguy 4y ago
I went back years ago when a lot of media companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix in favor of creating their own platforms. Cloudbox on a rented dedicated server, everything is automatic and things just show up in Plex.
- eptcyka 4y ago
  I love how horrible UX ends up wasting hardware - not that this is something to be held against people who host their own media services, I'm doing the same. But serving media is definitely a thing that scales well with centralized CDNs and other infrastructure - copying the same data to everyone's personal cloud hosted Plex implies duplicating a lot of terabytes, essentially wasting hard drive space, nobody watches their Plex troves 24/7, so the hard drives and CPUs will be idling a good amount of their life. Popcorntime was a great way to increase homebrew media distribution efficiency w.r.t. to content delivery and storage, maybe it's time it got resurected?
intrasight 4y ago
My approach has long been to "buy" content but then obtain that content via torrent.
robertoandred 4y ago
People who wanted to steal tv shows never stopped. It's an ethics thing, not a convenience thing.
- davidjfelix 4y ago
  I really don't think it's that simple. Ethics bend and break around inconvenience.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  I absolutely stopped pirating due to the convenience of streaming. Maybe I'm unusual, but I doubt it.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Very few people operate against ethics, virtually everyone considers convenience (or, in other words, non-tangible use cost).
- tcptomato 4y ago
  Copyright infringement isn't theft. And to say that it's just an ethics thing, is completely ignorant view. It's perfectly acceptable to torrent something when living in a country that wasn't deemed worthy by the rights holder to release their product there.
- jupp0r 4y ago
  Music piracy took off because people wanted to consume mp3s but the music industry kept telling them they should use CDs instead.
joshstrange 4y ago
Piracy is already the vastly superior user experience (If you are willing to put the time/money into it).
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
How accessible is piracy for the average person? I’ve had people in my circle of friends and acquaintances ask me how to pirate media safely. They are broadly aware that music and movies can be pirated, but they typically just visit some sketchy website that plays the content in the browser or they do not attempt to pirate anything because they are afraid of getting caught and/or sued. Downloading a torrent client and VPN is seen as confusingly complicated for many of them. Once I help them get past that, I also have to train them to search safely and parse the file names of what they are trying to find. More than just informing them that a movie is not a 25 MB exe file, but that there is a convention around encoding/file type, bit rate, and how episodes/tracks are named. It is understandable, but I think there is a huge mental barrier for most non-savvy computer users. I think that unless there is some friendly and non-sketchy all in one service to facilitate piracy there will not be some widespread upswell in piracy among the general public.
- Foxhuls 4y ago
  I’d recommend looking into Radarr and Sonarr. Those two programs really simplify the process and is basically automated once the initial setup including automatically moving and renaming the files for to a plex library if you happen to be interested in using something like plex. I personally think Usenet is better than torrenting but I also choose to spend about $60ish dollars per year on providers and indexers because I feel that it’s worth the cost.
  - dvngnt_ 4y ago
    for me this was infinitely harder than using kodi or just torrenting and saving to library. and i work in software dev with CS major.
    - Foxhuls 4y ago
      It’s definitely not the solution for everyone. I don’t and have never worked in anything IT related but I have a homelab for fun and this was just the first “major” thing I did with the old server I bought to teach myself some things and provide something somewhat useful at the same time.
zikduruqe 4y ago
Remember when you would pay for cable TV services so you didn't have to watch ads? -- something, something Pepperidge Farms meme.
- scarface74 4y ago
  That time was never https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177999
AlwaysRock 4y ago
Even if something is streaming, and you have access to all/most streaming services, its a pain to figure out what is on what platform. Want to watch the new season on x? Oh even though HBO has all the old seasons, the new season is on another service. Want to watch x movie you saw on netflix two months ago? Netflix doesnt have the rights anymore now and you'll have to dig through your streaming services to see where it landed or hope whatever, "Where is this streaming?" website you land on is accurate and up to date.
- shmatt 4y ago
  I find Roku's search engine great for this scenario. Tells you which service and also if its free with membership, without membership, or paid per episode
- RichardCNormos 4y ago
  The Pirate Bay has all the seasons. Even with the hassle of starting my VPN, downloading, making sure it's in the right format, dealing with subtitles (looking at you, Better Call Saul), piracy is a better experience than fragmented streaming.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Only to a geek. I much rather just pay money and juggle the streaming services. I had a Mac Mini running Front Row connected to a TV back in 2005 and then graduated to Plex until 2020. It’s really not worth it when both the AppleTV and Roku have universal search.
    - AlwaysRock 4y ago
      > I had a Mac Mini running Front Row connected to a TV back in 2005 and then graduated to Plex until 2020 Clicking a mirror link sounds less difficult than this. If you're going through the trouble of setting up some system its going to as simple to type in a show name and click a link... Even to a non geek.
- sfvegandude 4y ago
rchaud 4y ago
Superior UX, really? I'd agree if it were pre-2012 (Megaupload takedown), because back then torrent sites used to be able to operate with impunity. Go to the site, type something into search, then download. Now everything has moved to private trackers, invite-only Discords and more and more outside of the clearweb. That's a far worse UX IMO.
- waboremo 4y ago
  I find that to get the superior UX experience, there is quite a lot of work that has to be done upfront. A lot of technical experience is also assumed because many of these “bridges” don't have real guides. But once you do go through those trenches, it can be quite amazing to see how simple everything can be if things weren't exclusive to a dozen different streaming services.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by jupp0r 4y ago

Bold prediction: if ads on paid streaming services become the norm, there will be a renaissance of piracy because it will once again offer the superior user experience.

saiya-jin 4y ago

it never stopped being a superior experience for many types of users and many locations

MichaelCollins 4y ago

It's inevitable. Paying for cable TV was once pitched to the American public as a reprieve from ads. Now, virtually all cable TV channels have more ads than than broadcast television had in the first place.

fullshark 4y ago
Well its inevitable to have an ad-tier and an ad-free tier at least. One of the benefits of digital ads v. linear TV ads.
- Msw242 4y ago
  What do you do when you find out that you make more per ad-tier user than you do for ad-free user[0]? The incentives go in the wrong direction from a UX perspective [0] https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/hulu-makes-about-15-in-revenue-per-customer-every-month/ https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/hulu-makes-about-15-in-reven...
  - smeyer 4y ago
    Can the answer not just be to charge more for the ad-free tier? The gap between what I'm willing to pay for a streaming service with and without ads is a lot more than what the current going rate is.
    - moreira 4y ago
      The problem is that if you increase the price too much, the bad PR and hit to your reputation will likely offset any extra revenue. If a service like Hulu released a $50/mo ad-free tier people would freak out, even if they still had access to the same free ad-tier experience they do now. I don't know that it'd be beneficial.
    - lp0_on_fire 4y ago
      This is boiling the frog though? These services were sold to us as something without ads. Seems really mob-like for the services to say to me: pay more or we're going to start showing ads on the thing we sold to you with the promise you wouldn't have any ads. Rinse and repeat another year later.
      - smeyer 4y ago
        I don't think that's particularly a problem. Just because Netflix or Hulu offered one service when I first used them a decade ago doesn't mean they're obliged to provide the same service at the same price forever. I occasionally cancel a streaming service if I decide that it's no longer providing enough value to me, just like I'd cancel my current subscriptions if they started adding ads.
    - Msw242 4y ago
      Because raising prices doesn't necessarily increase revenue.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    They'll just make the ad free price higher or the ads more obnoxious (or turn the ad free tier into a slightly less ads tier)
scarface74 4y ago
Why does this meme always come up in any discussion when it only takes a little bit of research (if you aren’t old enough to remember) to know this was never true? Cable TV was first pitched as a method to get broadcast TV - with ads - in places that couldn’t get broadcast. Cable companies put big towers up and rebroadcasted network TV - with ads. Then HBO came along as an ad free premium channel and it still is. Then the “Superstations” like TBS out of Atlanta came along. Which were always ad supported and started broadcasting nationally. Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA. Not only dud they have ads from day one, they had infomercials to fill out the time when they didn’t have programming to show. There has never been a time since the invention of cable TV in the US that it was ad free.
- thakoppno 4y ago
  Thanks for mentioning this. I’ll admit I believed the meme. From a 1981 NYT article > Although cable television was never conceived of as television without commercial interruption, there has been a widespread impression - among the public, at least -that cable would be supported largely by viewers' monthly subscription fees. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-invaded-by-commercials.html https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  > Then the first cable channels came along like MTV, Lifetime, ESPN, USA. MTV was actually a ripoff of QUBE channel C-1 program "Sight on Sound" which didn't air advertisements the way we think of them. Instead record labels could pay to have their music videos prioritized or to run giveaway contests. QUBE also lead to the creation of Nickelodeon (Which itself was ad-free for several years). QUBE channel C-3 "Pinwheel" was the first cable channel made for only young children, and was spun off into Nickelodeon when QUBE went defunct. The QUBE T channels were just cable links to conventional OTA broadcast television channels (T for television). QUBE C channels (C for community) did not have ad breaks. Instead there would be sponsored giveaways or sponsored shows which eventually lead to the current practice of infomercials. Except with QUBE the segments were live and viewers could push one of 5 buttons on the remote to interact with the program. For example in a sponsored cosmetics segment viewers could vote on whether the next topic would be one of 5 options, lipstick, mascara, etc. Sight on Sound would ask some questions about current viewer demographics (are you male/female. Are you in age group ABCDE. How many people are watching right now), the dj would say it was to play music matching the current demographic, but it was mainly collected to give metrics to sponsored segments or to wait for an appropriate time to play a sponsored segment. But what most urban people considered "cable" at the time would be the QUBE P-channels. P for Pay. Unlike other pay channels at the time like HBO, the P channels were a monthly subscription (each), not pay per view. Notably, QUBE got into the news several times because of channel P-10, which aired softcore porn. Also ESPN did not initially air advertisements during programming, only in between programs. But they also only had sports no one really cared about for the first few years. No major sports, no college games. But they did have highlights and some international sports. https://youtu.be/7Fz1bSViIZw https://youtu.be/7Fz1bSViIZw The main reason early cable-only channels didn't have advertising is mainly because the subscriber numbers were so small there wasn't much revenue to be made targeting 5-10k viewers. Once subscriber numbers went up, and higher budget programming was in-demand (sports licensing is ridiculously expensive) ad breaks similar to OTA channels were introduced. But many of cable's early adopters bought into it on word of mouth, and word at the time was "no ad breaks!" It wasn't a goal of cable TV, just a side effect of the development. It was only a few years, but there were a few years when cable tv had no ad breaks for the majority of urban subscribers. It's sort of like someone saying Netflix used to have pretty much every show and movie, and then pulling up stats from 2014 and beyond saying no they didn't.

msoad 4y ago

Honestly I'm already off most of streaming services and use put.io for everything, including services that I'm already paying for. The home page that pushes garbage to my mind is another reason I'm avoiding those services. I want to watch things that I mindfully picked.

_trackno5 4y ago

I have to disagree with you. Coming from a country where media consumption used the be expensive, the reason people pirated entertainment was mainly due to cost. Not because it was inconvenient to see an ad. Streaming will still be miles more convenient than piracy. All I have to do is turn on my apple tv, grab the remote and watch whatever I want, whenever I want. I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv.

jjulius 4y ago
>I don’t have to dig through some torrent sites, download it, then stream it to the tv. You don't have to do that these days, either. There's software out there that will happily keep tabs on your favorite shows and films and download them as soon as they're available via torrent/newsgroup/etc., and then drop it directly into Plex, Kodi, or wherever, automagically. Just like streaming, but without the cost.
- synu 4y ago
  It will even download as you watch if you want to watch something without a delay.
- runjake 4y ago
  What might be some of the better software that does this? So I can avoid them, of course.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    Radarr and Sonarr; stay away from them!
    - runjake 4y ago
      Thank you for responding, I definitely will.
monetus 4y ago
I have access to apple TV, the service, but it is easier for me to use Kodi on a raspberry pi to watch it. Make of that what you will. I know there needs to be a hub for all of the streaming services, and the options seem imperfect in one significant way or another.

somehnguy 4y ago

I went back years ago when a lot of media companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix in favor of creating their own platforms. Cloudbox on a rented dedicated server, everything is automatic and things just show up in Plex.

eptcyka 4y ago
I love how horrible UX ends up wasting hardware - not that this is something to be held against people who host their own media services, I'm doing the same. But serving media is definitely a thing that scales well with centralized CDNs and other infrastructure - copying the same data to everyone's personal cloud hosted Plex implies duplicating a lot of terabytes, essentially wasting hard drive space, nobody watches their Plex troves 24/7, so the hard drives and CPUs will be idling a good amount of their life. Popcorntime was a great way to increase homebrew media distribution efficiency w.r.t. to content delivery and storage, maybe it's time it got resurected?

intrasight 4y ago

My approach has long been to "buy" content but then obtain that content via torrent.

robertoandred 4y ago

People who wanted to steal tv shows never stopped. It's an ethics thing, not a convenience thing.

davidjfelix 4y ago
I really don't think it's that simple. Ethics bend and break around inconvenience.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
I absolutely stopped pirating due to the convenience of streaming. Maybe I'm unusual, but I doubt it.
tomrod 4y ago
Very few people operate against ethics, virtually everyone considers convenience (or, in other words, non-tangible use cost).
tcptomato 4y ago
Copyright infringement isn't theft. And to say that it's just an ethics thing, is completely ignorant view. It's perfectly acceptable to torrent something when living in a country that wasn't deemed worthy by the rights holder to release their product there.
jupp0r 4y ago
Music piracy took off because people wanted to consume mp3s but the music industry kept telling them they should use CDs instead.

joshstrange 4y ago

Piracy is already the vastly superior user experience (If you are willing to put the time/money into it).

BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago

How accessible is piracy for the average person? I’ve had people in my circle of friends and acquaintances ask me how to pirate media safely. They are broadly aware that music and movies can be pirated, but they typically just visit some sketchy website that plays the content in the browser or they do not attempt to pirate anything because they are afraid of getting caught and/or sued. Downloading a torrent client and VPN is seen as confusingly complicated for many of them. Once I help them get past that, I also have to train them to search safely and parse the file names of what they are trying to find. More than just informing them that a movie is not a 25 MB exe file, but that there is a convention around encoding/file type, bit rate, and how episodes/tracks are named. It is understandable, but I think there is a huge mental barrier for most non-savvy computer users. I think that unless there is some friendly and non-sketchy all in one service to facilitate piracy there will not be some widespread upswell in piracy among the general public.

Foxhuls 4y ago
I’d recommend looking into Radarr and Sonarr. Those two programs really simplify the process and is basically automated once the initial setup including automatically moving and renaming the files for to a plex library if you happen to be interested in using something like plex. I personally think Usenet is better than torrenting but I also choose to spend about $60ish dollars per year on providers and indexers because I feel that it’s worth the cost.
- dvngnt_ 4y ago
  for me this was infinitely harder than using kodi or just torrenting and saving to library. and i work in software dev with CS major.
  - Foxhuls 4y ago
    It’s definitely not the solution for everyone. I don’t and have never worked in anything IT related but I have a homelab for fun and this was just the first “major” thing I did with the old server I bought to teach myself some things and provide something somewhat useful at the same time.

zikduruqe 4y ago

Remember when you would pay for cable TV services so you didn't have to watch ads? -- something, something Pepperidge Farms meme.

scarface74 4y ago
That time was never https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177999

AlwaysRock 4y ago

Even if something is streaming, and you have access to all/most streaming services, its a pain to figure out what is on what platform. Want to watch the new season on x? Oh even though HBO has all the old seasons, the new season is on another service. Want to watch x movie you saw on netflix two months ago? Netflix doesnt have the rights anymore now and you'll have to dig through your streaming services to see where it landed or hope whatever, "Where is this streaming?" website you land on is accurate and up to date.

shmatt 4y ago
I find Roku's search engine great for this scenario. Tells you which service and also if its free with membership, without membership, or paid per episode
RichardCNormos 4y ago
The Pirate Bay has all the seasons. Even with the hassle of starting my VPN, downloading, making sure it's in the right format, dealing with subtitles (looking at you, Better Call Saul), piracy is a better experience than fragmented streaming.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Only to a geek. I much rather just pay money and juggle the streaming services. I had a Mac Mini running Front Row connected to a TV back in 2005 and then graduated to Plex until 2020. It’s really not worth it when both the AppleTV and Roku have universal search.
  - AlwaysRock 4y ago
    > I had a Mac Mini running Front Row connected to a TV back in 2005 and then graduated to Plex until 2020 Clicking a mirror link sounds less difficult than this. If you're going through the trouble of setting up some system its going to as simple to type in a show name and click a link... Even to a non geek.
sfvegandude 4y ago

rchaud 4y ago

Superior UX, really? I'd agree if it were pre-2012 (Megaupload takedown), because back then torrent sites used to be able to operate with impunity. Go to the site, type something into search, then download. Now everything has moved to private trackers, invite-only Discords and more and more outside of the clearweb. That's a far worse UX IMO.

waboremo 4y ago
I find that to get the superior UX experience, there is quite a lot of work that has to be done upfront. A lot of technical experience is also assumed because many of these “bridges” don't have real guides. But once you do go through those trenches, it can be quite amazing to see how simple everything can be if things weren't exclusive to a dozen different streaming services.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]