XDCC and usenet were also quite popular back then as well.

Did anybody else start out watching anime on the Nintendo 3DS YouTube app? That thing could only load video at a max 144p and you had to infer what the subtitles were saying based on the shape of the blury smear that ueed to be words.

Went full circle with Naruto recently

I was around before YouTube. You don’t know true struggles.

I just use piracy sites for that nowadays 🙃