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Comment by sameerds | Hacker News Reader

This! A lot of young people pirate media to save money. But then when they grow up and start working, they /still/ keep pirating because now they are used to getting their hands on quality media that they like, rather than consuming whatever "curated content" the algorithm deems fit to make available. Usually these people are also subscribed to regular services, but still find it a far better experience to pirate stuff.

EDIT: Fixed typo "grow up".

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I disagree with this. I pirated everything when I was a teenager/in college because I didn’t have money. Now the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video. If it’s not on any of those FIVE subscription services, I’m pirating shamelessly and vindictively.

Pirating music isn’t worth my time with Spotify Premium.

I'm just out of uni and still don't have a lot of money, so still pirating. However-

>the only thing I pirate is the occasional movie I want to watch that isn’t on Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max or Amazon Prime Video.

You maintain 5 subscriptions and still have to pirate every now and again? I just watch whatever I want on plex+radarr/sonarr. That sounds exhausting.

I don't think I'll want to follow in your footsteps. Maybe I'll take out subscriptions for the things I really like, but I'm probably going to keep using pirated content for my actual consumption - its just a better experience at this point.

There’s a balance I think many of us try to strike because we find pirating “everything” to be cumbersome, but at the same time we recognize that pirating is unavoidable as there are some TV shows and movies that aren’t on any subscription service it seems, nevermind the 4 or 5 we happen to have.

You can of course just “download everything” with sonarr and radarr, but then you’re maintaining a server at home with X hard drives to store all the content.

But yeah don’t pay for subscription services if you don’t want to.

That's fair. My server setup is very small (pi with a harddrive) so I'm deleting stuff I don't watch anymore after it's seeded. And it is a hassle to set up. However I've also found now that it is setup, it takes basically no effort to maintain it, and I'd want the pi for other stuff anyway.

No. I started paying for movies and music the moment I could afford them which was relatively early into my adult, independent life. I still pirate content but it's because of regional restrictions, content being removed from my streaming service or otherwise unavailable in digital form.

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