It at it's worst in my opinion with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. They're all starting to get so fragmented that they're not much better than just paying for cable anymore, and that was their whole appeal to begin with. Now you have to sub to like 3 or 4 different services to get all the content you want (sometimes more) and they all seem to be phasing out their ad free tiers. It's like they forgot what made them so popular to begin with.

I agree fully. I basically never download music anymore, because I can get all the music I can think of on Spotify for a few bucks a month.

I recently started music pirating because I listen to a lot of genres and I want to shuffle them. If I use Spotify, I am limited to their shitty shuffler, but if I download my music offline, I can shuffle however I want. My favorite algorithm to shuffle my huge bunch of music is to shuffle them by genre. Now I get to listen to interesting music with full control over the algorithm used.

Also, there are frequent power cuts in my area, so an offline library always proves useful. I also visit places where internet connections are not available.

Also, my pirated game runs without trackers and forced updates. Steam version somehow insist on overlays, overnight updates, and likes to show me ads unless I google how to toggle them off.