this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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As always piracy is a symptom not the problem. People pirate when a) they don't have enough money or b) the experience for paying customers is significantly worse than for pirates, or c) the price of services far exceeds their perceived value. Piracy was down for a while because Netflix and Hulu were relatively cheap (or free), ad free, and the economy was doing OK so most people had a little disposable income.
Now that we're in a recession that's starting to look like it might turn into a depression and Netflix and Hulu (and others) have cranked the prices of their services up and stuffed them full of ads, yeah I'm not in the least surprised to see piracy surging. Every time you turn around there's another email from some service letting you know they're raising prices another couple bucks a month, and a bunch of people cancel their subscriptions and start sailing the high seas.
I will pay for content. I will not pay to watch ads. It's become my hill.
I stopped pirating when we got a Netflix sub for reasonably cheap.
I started pirating again when I realized we were subbed to six different platforms, paying over $1k a year for the content, and still couldn’t watch what we wanted sometimes. The fact that I had to jump through hoops to find the thing I wanted to watch was also quite infuriating.
Or c) the money never makes it to the actual artists so why give the record label money they don't deserve
This is it. I was sick of trying to figure out which streaming platform had the content I wanted. Now it’s all on Emby.
and D) I'm not going to give money to institutions like cable TV where a percentage of my money ends up with Fox News, or Paramount whose ownership is in bed with Trump, or Amazon and Bezos for obvious reasons. Go on down the line, fuck em all.