It gets fuzzy because show means different things when you’re mixing pay and present speeds, as it’s a relative term. Everything was slow back them by today’s standards When I first started torrents I was on a 1.5Mb connection, which felt screaming fast at the time, but now it feels crippling because everything has board to take advantage of the extra speed for more ads and tracking data. Plus now videos mostly default to 1080p now, but back then 4:3 was the typical ratio on most computer monitors, and HD wasn’t even born yet. Widescreen was still a baby.

I had visited some of the video sites back then, but I was more preoccupied with school and online gaming to give it a whole lot of thought for what was mostly people tripping on stuff and machinima type stuff.

I remember the buttons existing for it, but maybe it was just super and acceptable seeds.

Most stuff has so few seeds that I got anyway I was lucky to get the whole file anyway. Plus I was trying to get a collection of movies to keep, not just watch on demand.

So maybe I want the target audience for the feature. Plus if it had a lot of secrets it just made me more paranoid that there were undercover ones looking at it.

Which isn’t really bring the pale, especially since back then I didn’t even hardly know what encryption was, much less anything like Tor or VPNs.

I actually got a letter from the ISP one time, and it wasn’t even for a good movie.

I’d rather be surprised by that then assume that will be a thing and then be disappointed.

I plan on mostly degoogling and getting lineage or Graphene anyway, but I’m juggling several timelines while I decide how and when to proceed.

Do they prioritize the data at the beginning now? I haven’t done it in years but last time I did it just downloaded little pieces of the files until it has them all assembled, meaning that playback would be impossible if you try until it’s finished.

That’s kinda what I’m getting at. The waiting involved in watching one would kill me when they were popular. I was starting college in 04, and we upgraded to broadband shortly before I started, so I didn’t really go to them much at all before that. Watching a tiny gif was actual torture on dial up, video wasn’t even attempted unless it sounded REALLY cool.

Video content creation wasn’t a thing that far back.

YouTube was (in my experience) the first site at all where you could click a video and not wait 3 years for it to load, plus having a UI around it.

Most people’s Internet speeds weren’t even close to being fast enough to consistently load them fast enough to want to watch more than a few in a session. Decent waits and buffers throughout still made it painful. Just less painful than it was before.

Most other videos back then were scattered around on separate sites, and related to the content on the site, and they usually had to download completely before even starting to play. (Kinda like pirating a movie these days)

So given that most people couldn’t use other sites and tolerate it for long, YouTube created a market that didn’t exist before, and there wasn’t a content creation machine in place ready to go.

That kinda took off as more and more people got broadband connections and started being able to watch almost as soon as they clicked a link.

I don’t have hard dates for this, just an impression from memory of the era.

So the “creators” were just random people filming slightly less random things. There weren’t well known channels, or filters for different genes or topics. You could choose from “dude filming an animal do something funny” or “something unlikely to be caught on camera being caught on camera”.

And most of it was shot on terrible cameras (since digital cameras were still going from “looks like objects filmed through 4 layers of plastic” to “really tiny footage of decent quality”, there wasn’t much that existed to draw a lot of people other than a feeling of hoping to stumble on the newest really cool clip.

But, since capitalism exists to make everything worse, the market got its act together shortly after. But not immediately. It took a whole new kind of infrastructure to get it moving.

People needed better digital cameras (unless you thought transferring from analog tapes was a fun weekend), better Internet, and the site itself has to start figuring out how to run things to make a better experience.

Google buying it was both a great infusion of capital to help it as well as being a cancer injection that would poison it.

I like the concept of peertube, but it’s not gonna take off in its current state. I don’t think anything takes off without capitalism happening to it these days. If something takes off, it’s probably fruit of a poisonous tree. Can’t have any good new popular technology without it being tampered with by billionaires

It seems to work pretty well in my opinion.

I still catch a stray every now and then, but if I had to ball park it off the top of my head I’d say less than once a month.

But they come in spurts, so maybe they all change numbers and get through once, then back to the shadow realm for months in a row.

Until next year when “sideloading” dies, and we’re back to square one.