Now, yes. Back in the day? Ehhh maybe not. Early files and torrents were super low quality, maybe had an RSS feed. Hell, the original client was one window with one d/l going. You had to launch another instance to d/l another one. Then Netflix happened and it was like “man, this is pretty cheap and the quality is better than i’m getting online” and the hat went away for a while. Now that we are essentially back to cable, out came the hat.
I remember walking around my neighborhood with a box of floppies going from friend to friend making mass copies of games we had for the c64 (was popular among my friends). We were just sharing, didn’t even think about piracy then. Cracktro’s were just neat things to my tiny brain then, not “we cracked this, you pirated it!”. I really didn’t get that point of it being piracy until I hit a BBS outside of my normal area that had FULL PROGRAMS to d/l for free! Took a month and a day at 300baud but holy crap, that program costs literally over $1000 but there it is in all it’s free glory. That was really my beginning into donning the hat and setting sail.
I love the idea that piracy is platform agnostic.
We are still “customers”. They sell in-show product placement that we see also. Don’t let any of their BS fool you, they are still making a pretty penny off us. MUSO puts out a pdf every year with the standard “piracy bad” stuff but makes sure to pitch the idea that torrent data is valuable in a number of ways. They seem to be the only anti-piracy outfit that “gets it”.
Larger board DDL sites are kinda like this. You can jsut browse new entries our look up what you want. It’s pretty nice. Good community, has that “Ohh look what i found” feel when looking around.
Although most of my stuff is 100% automated with *arr stack and Plex (jellyfin backup).
Even though prices are stupid atm, this is your push to finally spin up a local jellyfin instance. You can run this off an old laptop and an external drive. It won’t be fantastic but it will work and you can look and giggle at the IP holders wringing their hands not knowing how to actually stop piracy. Hell, my entire docker stack (minus plex) is just on a pi. Starting off it’s not too expensive. The expense hits when you turn it into a full blown hobby and you are looking at homelab setups ontop of your htpc setup.