Trying Soulseek/Nicotine+ for the first time, and I noticed something...

i don't go into the chat rooms, but i get about one dm a week from some rando or another who's downloaded something from me thanking me for having whatever shit from 30 years ago they haven't heard in forever, it's honestly been a pretty positive experience overall for me.

like this lad last night

why would you use soulseek for chat

My philosophy is that slsk is for the downloads, not the conversation.

Every unmoderated internet space is destined to look like that. Just use it for music sharing and you won't even know the chat is there.

Don't go in the chatrooms except for private ones is my rule for soulseek for exactly this reason.

If you ignore the chatrooms, you should still be able to use it effectively.

Lots of crossover between 4chan and the general piracy community. First place I actually heard about soulseek was on the 4chan music board. I don't really go there anymore. So yeah, its 4channers thinking they're in good company.

For the record, I have not noticed this as "piracy in general", no. Malware, dubious claims, dubious quality, dubious people, "extra information" that's undesirable? Sure, they all happen, that's part of the whole "get shit for free" deal. People are dipshits and I get how that's really annoying. But... aren't you in it for the free shit? Do you need to engage with the community much?

Racist, sexist, homophobic (etc. - god knows it's a long enough list) are generally "edgy" and therefore automatically hysterically funny to a bunch of people - teenagers and others who might be well represented in piracy for whatever reason. Hell, some of that shit is funny even if you ethically oppose it 100%.

You don't need to participate, agree or approve, just get what you came for and leave the edgelords to their edgelording.

I don't even know why there's a chat room function in it. I never use it tbh

You've encountered Gabriel's Greater Internet Dickwad Phenomenon - basically, if you take an average person and remove accountability for their actions, a significant subset of them will turn out to be total dickwads. Much like how lactic acid bacteria will render their environment acidic so that other bacteria cannot thrive, it takes a shockingly small percentage of total dickwads to render an environment so toxic to regular people that the only people who thrive there are other dickwads.

The fact is that the majority of the community isn't like that, but because we exist at the fringes due to the semilegitimate nature of piracy there often isn't a lot of effort to keeping the community decent. Just do what most of us do, download and move on.

Yeah I would just stay clear of the chat. There's plenty of normal people on the network, it's just they don't use the chat either. I've met some cool folks through DM's though.

It's the internet. Youre going to run into people you don't like online. If you want to live in a coca cola commercial I hear there's a whole strip mall of multi billion dollar corporate websites you can use, stick to those.

Yeah, I recently used Soulseek for the first time and it's been great but those chat rooms are shit. Honestly though I'm not using it for chat so after I checked it out and made the same discovery you did, I decided there was nothing to gain there anyway.

Piracy in general is a pretty mixed bag but I don't think those chatrooms represent the community at large. Usually the worst thing people in this community do is just refuse to be helpful. And there are a lot of very generous people who keep this whole thing going.

If this is the general spirit of piracy, I don't know if I'm interested

I don't use soulseek but no, I certainly wouldn't describe that attitude as the general spirit of piracy. I'm mostly familiar with the private torrent trackers. While I've certainly come across fascists (EMPRESS is a good example, they're pretty explicitly transphobic and include a bunch of slurs in their nfo's), I generally come across plenty of libs and even some anarchists and communists. And based on events and how the private trackers are moderated, the staff, at least on the sites I use, they seem pretty alright. For example, I know of at least a couple trackers that ran events for pride month.

And from hanging out in leftist spaces, they seem especially cool with piracy. They're anticapitalist after all, so it shouldn't be a surprise.

My problem with Soulseek is that it only really has music. That's it. I'm more interested in stuff for retro game systems. Not just the stuff that's listed in No-Intro or some GoodSet, you can find those anywhere. I'm trying to find a site that has stuff that isn't just the same sets you see everywhere. But I can't find one.

it’s pretty widely known that its a toxic hellscape there, i’ve typically had great interactions with users in dm’s but the chatrooms have become overrun with toxicity and fascists over the past decade, it’s absolutely not representative of the online music community which is largely left leaning, even on p2p and piracy platforms

i tried it for 10 minutes and nobody ever replied to me

also, anonymity? Isn't direct ip address connection, so easily traceable?

I have a somewhat large share on Soulseek. It's fun to occasionally go through the chat rooms and ban all the blatant racists and homophobes.

Welcome to chatrooms, they were always like this its just a lost phenomenon to most people especially those that didn't grow up with them. Ignore and move on is pretty standard practice, I'm on slskd and I've only gotten DMs not sure if it even has the chat enabled by default

Nobody with sense uses the main Nicotine room.

Touch grass.