Also when you combine this with some other news, like "Bots now make up nearly half of all internet traffic, and that's very bad news for our security", it skews it even further to being rather meaningless - bots are probably doing quite a bit less bittorrenting.

In early 2019 bittorrent's website views fluctuated between ~6M to ~9M. Now it's around 3M to 4M.

In early 2019 utorrent's visits fluctuated between ~26M to ~75M. Now it sits around 25M to 21M.

The fact that there were far more captures in early 2019 for both of them might be an indication that this was their peak, and while visits have reduced since then they're far from dying.

Streaming services may be part of the reason, though I also think it's because many games and software have switched to freemium & microtransactions so spending money is optional, along with the fact that free and open source alternatives to mainstream software have become more robust and popular. When I was a kid I torrented Sony Vegas, but now that's simply not necessary since we have DaVinci Resolve.

I know those good old school days. downloading movies, songs, games, and wares on utorrent. No ransomware, no social media giants, just sharing content and information and exploring the internet at 286kbps.

There was a blip in time a few years back when you really didn't need to learn how to bittorrent, you could just google what you wanted and you'd get a pirate streaming site showing it. I've been torrenting for almost two decades now and still kissanime/aniwatch/zoto whatever was the faster choice most of the time, and even now I sometimes use the Kodi plugin Otaku when I just want to watch an ep or two while eating, and that grabs stuff from streaming sites. Granted it is getting worse and worse, with the sites being absolutely riddled with ads and seemingly rebranding twice a month due to takedowns which has me going back to nyaa more often.

What I’ve seen from the average person, torrenting safely is for techies and most aren’t bothered with the effort of it. It’s a low hurdle that most people don’t want to waste time on. Building a local collection takes a shit ton of time. I’m currently rebuilding my music collection to roll my own music streaming server and I’m questioning the time value. But I’m sick of music I like getting deplatformed due to licensing

I was using streaming-based sites the first few years because it was easy but it had its issues. With uBlock Origin, ads and popups weren't a problem anymore but there were still issues like bad quality, buffering and your progress in a show not being tracked. This promptet me to try out Jellyfin with the arr stack and it's so much better. I had to get used to having to wait for shows and movies to download before being able to watch them but the experience was so much better aside from that. Great quality, a nice interface where your progress is tracked, everything loads perfectly fine, I can make accounts for friends and family and no ads or shit like that. It took some time to perfect my setup but now I have a lot of private torrent trackers and usenet and I can get pretty much everything I want to watch, even in German, in the best quality that is available, especially when something's available in AV1.

You need time, knowledge and money to get a setup as good as I have and it's worth it for me personally (selfhosting is also my main hobby, after all) but most people don't have all that, so I can understand why doing it like this is a pretty niche thing and why not a lot of people are doing it nowadays.

BitMagnet isn’t a silver bullet. Its datastore use makes it rather unreliable past about 2M torrents mark.

I mean IPFS was that solution to me for a while tbh. Even then libp2p like peertube uses and matrix offer some exciting examples into the future.