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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

I'm always amazed that there are still people actively using torrents, given that even for popular software like Windows LTSB/LTSC there are virtually no well-seeded torrents on TPB and the music market has been pretty much eliminated by Spotify.

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Except there's still so much content you don't find on commercial platforms, and even when you find it it may disappear from one day to the next due to evolving contracts between shareholders and the platform.

Also, streaming from a big multinational corporation works fine in well-connected areas but is a terrible experience on the country side and in the Global South. Where your connection to AWS/Google/Netlify is measured in Kb/s, torrents are a blessing because it spreads the load across several routes (including more local ones, because cloud providers are really slow from eg. Africa) and you can leave the downloads running all night.

Torrents and other content-addressed systems are by far technically superior to centralized location-addressed systems like HTTP.

Audiobooks and E-books are really frustratingly distributed IMO. A lot are simply not available in my region, all the major platforms will game search results with misleading dark patterns to make you think they have a title until you're done signing up at which point you discover it's actually not available and you're locked in some account you need to contact customer support to delete/close. Sorry for the rant, went through this about 4-5 times recently before giving up and pirating a title.

Seems what you are actually amazed by is that people use piratebay - not torrents. In reality they dont, not really, as The piratebay is long gone and dead. These are just spam sites.

It's gonna increase as these streaming services continue popping up for every single network and forcing you to pay ridiculous rates to see everything you want. I'm now back paying exactly what I did for cable/dish back in the day.

Well, looking at the E-books category, I can see quite a few well-seeded entries... unfortunately, most of them seems to be focused on finding G spot and/or having great oral sex (not saying that's not valuable, but!) Almost nothing that caught my attention, and having no sub-categories in E-books means that for every title I find I'd have to wade through pages upon pages of irrelevant results...

Would be nice to know the alternative. Downloading everything and then deleting things that you realize you didn't actually want (after looking at the full contents) was a quite convenient UX.

For ebooks you need to get into a specialized ebook focused tracker like myanonamouse

For ebooks, you can search in duck duck go, the last letter of the alphabet followed by the first three of the word "library"

My first thought after I deciphered the puzzle was: oh, it's just the name of a popular compression algorithm library! :) Thanks, I didn't know about the site existence. Wondering if it got de-listed, too? :)

depends on where you live probably, and how accessible things are on the internet for you...including how easy it is to make payments on the internet for you. Torrents are a blessing otherwise.

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