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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I think centralization also ruined the internet (to go back to the days of forums where we didn't have constant culture wars over who controlled the four or five social media sites...).

What a coincidence: video probably requires the most centralization and capital.

The centralization trend was already present, hell Usenet was a central forum before people used the term forum (compared to contemporary BBSs.)

Not exactly: copyright compliant video does. Bittorrent was wiping the floor with mainstream services for a long time. Now they're about on par.

Even putting aside ease of use (I know people here will object but some people really don't want to do the minimum and would just rather use Youtube/Netflix/whoever) there are forms of media that aren't best suited to Bittorrent.

For example: obscure stuff was often a problem due to the need for seeders. I imagine a lot of stuff (e.g. low-view, long runtime streams) would also have issues lasting.

I dunno, I'm still happily using it, and obscure media are a lot easier to find there.

Yeah I was going to say torrenting is my first choice for obscure shit these days. You might not get it immediately due to seeding, but at least it's there.