Soulseek was pretty sweet - people would chat me up when downloading an album they shared and ask if I wanted anything else they hadn't ripped yet - or recommend something similar.
It was more like napster though and not torrent based iirc.
Soulseek is very much still around. I recently logged in for the first time in a long while, and I was able to get all kinds of rare recordings. That said, it seems a less social place than 20 years in terms of using the chat feature. I would suspect that the majority of heavy Soulseek sharers are now in their 30s and 40s, with careers and families, and not so interested in making new music friends.
I think part of the reason is that audio streaming is relatively cheap and easy. I was never on oink but I was on what.cd, and I remember I started using it less and less as services like Spotify got better and better in terms of quality and content.
If we compare music to movies and TV where the official ways of accessing content are such a complete shitshow, you have amazing sites like passthepopcorn and broadcasthenet, which to me are of a similar quality to what.cd was for music.
I think it just demonstrates again the fact that piracy is in large part driven by difficulty and cost of access to official releases.
I mean, I'm not badly-off, I have a very well paying job and I /could/ afford to spend the money on a load of subscriptions, it's just such a hassle. Much easier and less frustrating to just check PTP or BTN for something I want to watch.
