Yeah I think that’s a decent comparison. There are of course still hobbyists and enthusiasts today who know a lot about cars despite not being professionals working in a related field, but it does feel like the general understanding among the public has fallen because the cultural phenomenon of a father teaching his son about cars has dissipated. Piracy has always been a niche activity but the core skills and knowledges it requires were taught more to millennials than they were to zoomers. If people have grown up with less education about motor engines or desktop computers then it’s not surprising they struggle to expand on that later in life.

Acknowledging differences is not “war”.

This was a pretty underwhelming article. Most of it is a pretty uninteresting story about how the site was founded, which isn’t really relevant to the headline.

Resolution doesn’t mean much, those sites you are referring to use extremely low bitrate encodes that look terrible. Yes, streaming services (in my experience Netflix is the main offender) can sometimes deliver dogshit quality streams too due to their adaptive bit rates, but the ceiling is way higher than those sites that pull from DDL file hosters. If you are consistently suffering from very low quality paid streams then you likely have some kind of network issue affecting the adaptive bitrate.

Most streaming services have introduced cheaper “ad-supported” tiers within the last few years while jacking up the prices of the existing tiers. There is usually a price gap designed to either make you sit through ads or overpay to remove them. Many (most?) people don’t even use ad-blockers in their web browsers and are psychologically trained to sit through ad breaks, either because of TV (older generation) or YouTube (younger generation) which is why these streaming companies can get away with such a betrayal of their original premise.

Confucius is that you?

I guess relatively few people still turn to piracy, it seems like all these streaming platforms are massively increasing their prices knowing that their customers will try to rationalise the extra spending somehow.

If you search on solidtorrents.to there is a version with ~17 seeders.

If you have slower internet or don’t seed 24/7, I would recommend just focusing on seediing torrents with a low number of seeders. It doesn’t really matter if you leech the latest episode of a popular new TV series, as there will be so many other seeders, (many with a better capacity to seed). However, for something older or more niche your decision to seed or leech could determine whether someone else gets to enjoy that content.

It’s actually 4 years now. Still terrible for the price, of course.

Not laughing at the paying customers

You literally changed the title so you could call them idiots.

Yes, people have had these existential crisis moments about piracy for many years. Just a couple of notable examples within my lifetime were the many issues of The Pirate Bay in the 2000s, the closure of KickassTorrents in the 2010s and RARBG’s shutdown last year. People panicked over the initial DeezLoader and YouTube Vanced project shutdowns too. Every single time, without fail, something new rises up whether it’s a direct clone or something entirely new. It’s not always as good initially, but I can’t really say any of these “crackdowns” have had a significant effect from my perspective.

Yes, the projects on GitHub were shutdown. That doesn’t mean the extension suddenly became “ineffective” or is no longer being worked on. It was simply cloned elsewhere and development continues. I think I am getting an idea of why you’re so pessimistic about piracy - you base your opinions on articles and forum speculation instead of lived experience. If you actually used this extension, you would know that at no point has it stopped working.

Almost all the ways to bypass news paywalls are currently ineffective.

What are you referring to here? Bypass Paywalls Clean is still being updated and covers a lot of stuff across multiple languages.

Is that actually a proxy or just a clone?

🤡

*Nyaa-uh

It’s funny how similar these shutdown messages always are. They never state the real reason why the project is ending and always have some weird sentence at the end recommending everyone use paid services, even though their entire project completely undermined them for years. I guess they are advised (threatened) to use certain language by whoever is pressuring them.

One of my university lecturers uses this, I could see it in his bookmarks while he cast his browser lol

You act like this is a universally confusing concept, when it’s only Americans who seem to have difficulty understanding that different countries have different laws and definitions. In any case, it was reported as solitary confinement in both the EU and US at the time so I’m not really sure what you guys are crying about.