Megaupload. It was like the Library of Alexandria burning down. Not just pirated stuff, either.
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I remember to swear by megaupload because all the other upload sites uses extremely sketchy ads and allow the fake download buttons.
Now Jdownloader is the only way for me to download non-torrents
15ish years ago when Seagate was having lots of issues with their 2TB externals getting the click o' doom I lost 6 2TB drives over 2 years.
The data was just data, easily re-acquirable, but fuck that was a pain in the ass.
tntvillage
It was, hands down, THE place for every Italian media
Napster
Maybe not the actual biggest, but the loss of pirated material that i feel the most sad about is The Trove. The Trove was a website with a huge list of downloadable PDFs of source books for tabletop RPGs. I got the pdfs for everything DND, and also tried a bunch of other games I'd never heard of with a few friends. It also had downloads for other books and documents but I only used it for RPGs. I think it went down in 2019 or so.
I think there are some telegram groups with that type of material in them if you take a quick look. Not sure how they compare with your old resource though.
Deeeefonitely what.cd for me. RIP WCD. We have two great music trackers now, but nothing comes close to WCD.
Websites: rarbg and emuparadise
Personally: I have an 8tb HDD completely full with shows and movies I haven't tested since a house fire. I'm afraid it may have been dropped in the move, and I don't even have my PC with me to check it out
You and another have already said it, but Emuparadise. It was...truly a shame. :'(
TheTrove was a collection of tabletop RPG books and magazines going back decades that has never had a decent replacement yet. It was fairly well organized and quite complete with tons of obscure games and out of print books. It had a different name or two before that but the collection always migrated somewhere until The Trove was finally shut down. I really miss that collection, even though I've managed to track down most of what I needed, it has been much more difficult since the shutdown.
It continues marching on as The Eye.
If I understand, that collection is missing a lot from the original. I could be wrong though.
At least part of it survives. Better some than none.
I remember using something called ourtunes back in college that just let everyone in the dorm freely access and download each others iTunes libraries on the dorm network.
Going a bit old-school with this one, but unmoderated DALnet. It used to be the wild West, with everything at your fingertips.
DALnet and EFnet were both great for that
+1, the IRC days were glorious
Taringa, it was the go-to place for everything, especially content in spanish
ProstoPleer! Russian website with direct mp3 downloads and uploads, playlist creation and sharing, just like the old GrooveShark. I was lucky that I made a backup of all my playlists 2 months before it happened.
Oink, Demonoid, AsianDVDclub... Various private Hotline sites circa 90s. Sadly missed
Demonoid, absolutely! Warez-bb, and many oldschool GeoCities blogs. I remember one that had portable cracks of any programs you could imagine.
TorrentDB. First tracker I participated. Good layout, nice rules. Sad to see it go
torrentz.eu, started my torrent journey in 2010 from this website.
Haven't quite filled the void from 9anime/aniwave going down, hard to replace the king.
GrooveShark was a great music streaming service. If a track wasn't available you could just upload it and it would be available to all users.
It eventually got sued into oblivion leaving us with the streaming platforms of today. I really wish it could have made the transition to being legit because it had a great interface.
If you like the interface, check out Funkwhale. It's a federated service based on Grooveshark, but you need to provide your own mp3/flac files.
Oh hell yeah! That sounds great!
DC++ It was just sharing stuff. No search. You connect to someone’s computer, they have a shared folder. You download what you want and move on. Instead of searching for stuff, you discovered it.