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.

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.

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

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.