[lukan]

"What about kids?"

They usually have someone more mature watching over them as there are also other dangers in life except malware on their phones.

(Also, when I was a kid there was no one to explain me the internet, so I learned on my own and understood it better then those responsible for me.

But it was a different internet back then. )

[Imustaskforhelp]

Don't know about a mature but I wanted to play pokemon yellow on my mum's phone and I was in 2nd grade iirc and my brother just told me to search pokemon yellow rom myself and learn how to download/pirate it. He didn't help me at all, even though. he had pirated it earlier.

Made me learn pirating which went into more and more technical untill I think nowadays I dabble in playing pirated games in linux and linux scripting and just general coding.

There was no mature watching over me. I was downloading everything dude, heck I had once downloaded hollow knight as an apk to play it and I am pretty sure that it was a malware which i had quickly deleted as it wasn't working but now yes we've even migrated over from the phone.

So in a way my mature watching over me was saying, Idk learn it yourself, fuck around and find out.

I kinda think that grapheneos would be really nice for protecting your phone from something like malware from what I've heard.

[jackstraw42]

downloading ROMs helped me learn how to do things the right way too. but even back then those kinds of places were filled with traps, remember pop-ups and pop-under ads? from that point forward, learning how to safely download ROMs and whatever else I wanted to do on the internet just felt natural.

What worries me though is that maybe we weren't the norm, maybe we were the exceptions.

[Imustaskforhelp]

r/piracy was something that I discovered really late but I am glad I am.

I recommend it to every of my friend who comes to me begging me to download X or Y or pirate it.

I remember those links where you had to go through the entire article and it would give a (1 of 2) and you have to do that again and again for them to finally get to the final download.

Yes downloading them were indeed a hassle but idk i guess those feelings are really compensated by me playing pokemon, like I genuinely have forgotten some of those popups but I do know that they were really shitty.

here's what I would recommend anybody now:

r/piracy is your best friend, try to read it and prefer to get the goated version of things use brave browser if you don't want ads/ librewolf/firefox with ublock on pc.

I am not advocating piracy because well, I just can't pay for products and my frugal living doesn't really find it to have peace. I would much rather donate to them directly with a thank you message but maybe that's my ideal.

The only game I was thinking to buy was silksong but my brother has a ps5 and he would've had to download it seperately and I wanted to split even 20$ lol.

I wanted to buy silksong as a way of saying thank you to the devs for finally making things cheap enough and making me feel like my money is worth it even if I am frugal y'know.

I feel like everyone iscammed by 70$ games bro, I am never paying them.

One time, idk what i downloaded, but it was prob malware in the sense that even if no app is running/removed that app, it would still open up browser and open up some link automatically sometimes..

And pop ups on websites were a nightmare to dodge, pop under ads yeah. I remember it all now. it used to take me definitely 15 minutes or more to download a rom but that was compensated by the hours I used to play bro.

I love pokemon johto with my ampharos of level 75, it used to one shot everything except rock/steel. Electric was goated in johto. And I had a water type pokemon too/there was one fighting type move that I taught my ampharos. I think I even defeated red from gen 1 ( I am talking about the actual gen 2 pixelated game and not the next silver games, I think it was the crystal or silver or gold, I am not sure mareep was only available to play in one of these games and dude mareep is goated and makes me remember my childhood)