Tell HN: I probably spend more on piracy than if I just paid for content

I have a confession, I pirate a lot of content. Mostly TV/Movies. That being said, piracy is pretty expensive.

I built a computer with ~30TB of hard drive space. That, conservatively, cost me $1200. It's an older computer, with a lot of hard drives and it's probably costing me around $45 per month in power. I'm going to want to add more storage space soon, and have about $500 slated for that. I pay a usenet subscription, and subscription to indexers, for let's say $10 per month...

So if I stopped pirating I'd have saved $1200 and still have a budget of $55 per month for streaming services.

So why do I still pirate? Well one thing is show availability. There are some must-have shows that simply aren't available in my region (not the US), so I already have to have the piracy infrastructure in place if I want to watch them.

I also very much appreciate having a local copy. It's not like steam where I can just download whatever I want and play it offline (I do mostly buy steam content, if it's on steam I probably don't bother to pirate).

Streaming services still have significant service problems that need to be addressed.

Then you'd be back to the 'availability' thing.

I haven't paid for 90-95% of the content I consumed in the past 12 years. I've never spent a cent on it.(and I used to spend many hours watching new movies/shows every single day+Music+AAA games)

Maybe try not hoarding all the half-decent movies on earth in 4K bluray version? at this point you have more data than a small piracy site...

Swedish author Wilderäng made a good move. First book of a Trilogy was on Pirate Bay. And then goddämn, I had to buy rest of those books with my own precious money, because it was important to know what happens to Sweden under zombie apocalypse.

Piracy and data-hoarding are two different hobbies. One cost next to nothing, the cost of the other one you are quite familiar with..

Jokes aside, would you consider deleting your entire collection and then also cancel subscriptions and possibly give away or sell any tech equipment you do not use for work? And then find something else to do with the newly-freed time? Can you do it for 6 or 12 months? If not, why not? Try to figure out why you are doing it to begin with.