• Assian_Candor [comrade/them]
    ·
    22 days ago

    Napster was so sick. The halcyon days before the RIAA caught on were amazing. The real shame is we only had 56k phone modem connections!

    When people started receiving dmca notices in the mail we could hardly believe it. End of an era. That was Clinton by the way.

    The Internet was so different back then, before corporatization. There was so much promise in the thing. Now it's just another tool for business. Sad really.

    • pumpchilienthusiast [comrade/them, any]
      ·
      22 days ago

      The Internet was so different back then, before corporatization. There was so much promise in the thing. Now it's just another tool for business.

      it went from a truly weird, unique, mostly anti-commercial and grass roots place to literally just another dying mall

    • pumpchilienthusiast [comrade/them, any]
      ·
      22 days ago

      honestly it was a dogshit with shitty rips and mislabeled files, but the RIAA's crackdown gave truly amazing BitTorrent sites where obsessive nerds got their chance to shine with their painstaking care to have quality rips, tagging, etc. and music fans could easily get rare and OOP albums

      • BelieveRevolt [he/him]
        ·
        22 days ago

        It was popular because MP3 sites kept getting taken down and it was much harder to shut down a P2P sharing service.

        I agree that the mislabeled files sucked, but I probably wasn't the only one who got some amusement out of seeing just how many at school thought System of a Down did a Zelda song.