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

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

#301

Post by cybrox »

philistine wrote: post #103

What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it? I delete it. Poof, gone. But it’s still in the most important dataset I have. My memory. To help with the metadata of my own memory, I write down a list of the films I’ve seen. I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). That TV show I just finished that was great…

Data hoarding is not a problem. Collecting and organizing something can bring great joy to people. Think of collectors.

Most of my collection is older stuff, not available on streaming services anymore. Forgotten, almost, in a lot of places since companies can't be bothered to license it anymore.

In an age where a lot of culturally relevant media is not stored on physical copies anymore, preserving what we love for our children is all the more important.

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

#302

Post by pirate-Loo6uoDu »

pwg wrote: post #296
pirate-Loo6uoDu wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My estimate is that it's idling at ~250w. I'm admittedly fudging the details a bit, right now archive-team-warrior is using a lot of CPU because it's archiving telegram, and that's pushing the number up. Calculating it again the actual number is a bit lower than that, and it wasn't in US dollars.

With a Kill A Watt (or similar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_A_Watt ) meter, you don't have to estimate power usage, you can measure the actual power usage.

I've got one, but it's being used for other stuff.

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

#303

Post by Mo3 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #232
Mo3 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's on usenet, not torrenting. No need to keep or seed anything. OP is hoarding and attributing negative consequences of his own decision to a concept itself.

And who do you think reuploads stuff after DMCA/NTD takedowns?

Im aware some people are busy hoarding data and providing it back to the ecosystem in these cases, but I fail to understand why or how the cost of this personal decision is in any way related to the cost of piracy, or why someone with this hobby would feel the need to complain about it, or publicly associate these costs with piracy itself. That’s illogical.

It’s like mirroring Wikipedia on S3 and then publicly stating or even complaining that using Wikipedia costs hundreds of dollars.

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

#304

Post by dilap »

hotpotamus wrote: post #25

Welcome to Hacker News where everyone makes $500k/year and nobody pays for content. Or at least it feels that way sometimes. I don't make that much money but I also don't pay for content.

I used to not have any $, so I'd pirate. Then I had $, so I paid for stuff -- and, without fail, everything I paid for ended up giving me bullshit problems because of DRM restrictions. So now I don't pay for anything with DRM, which ends up meaning I mostly pirate.

I don't mind throwing down some cash, but I'm not going to throw down cash just to get fucked over.

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

#305

Post by gigel82 »

$45 / month for power seems excessive. I have a home server where I selfhost a bunch of services and am using an 1080Ti GPU on it to mine Ethereum (65% or 125W) and it's costing me $18 / month in electricity to run 24/7 (the Ethereum I mine pays for all of it even now with the crashed crypto prices).

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

#306

Post by jrochkind1 »

joshgachnang wrote: post #269
jrochkind1 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After all, if you want to watch it again -- you can always pirate it again! (The one complication is that I pirate using private BitTorrent tracker sites where I need to do some amount of seeding to stay on good terms, under conditions that vary from site to site, and can be hard to keep track of as I try to recover storage space). But yeah, I'd say the cost of OP is not in the pirating, it's in the hoarding.

You say that, but a lot of older shows become increasingly hard to get copies of the longer from the air date you get (legally or pirated)

I have not had that experience as a pirater of TV shows, I can have pretty much always been able to get anything I ever wanted that I ever could before, through the sources I use.

But certainly there is no guarantee, that is true.

(I don't use usenet as a source, myself).

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

#307

Post by xaedes »

klibertp wrote: post #174

Stop with all the watching (and to a lesser extent listening) and start reading and hoarding books instead. 99% of downloaded content you will never read, but at 0.5~4.0Mb per book just two cheap, but RAIDed with ZFS for safety, 1Tb 3.5" HDDs will last you a lifetime. And that's before turning any kind of compression on!

If I might add, hoarding physical books is also a worthwhile hobby.

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #250
mechanical_bear wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ethical considerations aside for pirating: I agreed with you until the final sentence. There is no problem with choosing to keep a show after watching it, that’s their choice. Why would a data retention strategy that differs from yours be a “problem”?

Only because of the cost, which is only a problem for the person doing it if they find it to be so personally, which the OP seems to, so. Or maybe I misinterpreted this post and they don't think it's a problem, which is fine then. But if the post is about how expensive it is to pirate... that expense has a lot to do with the data retention policy choice, not just the pirating. Is the point to be made.

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by 867-5309 »

philistine wrote: post #103

What you’re describing is data hoarding. I pirate a ton too, but you know what I do with a movie or TV show after I’ve watched it? I delete it. Poof, gone. But it’s still in the most important dataset I have. My memory. To help with the metadata of my own memory, I write down a list of the films I’ve seen. I only keep the movies I really love and want to rewatch (Robocop). That TV show I just finished that was great…

why would data hoarding be a problem? it can be a perfectly legitimate hobby, has massive communities and also acts as digital preservation, think the biggest hoarder on the planet archive.org

I hear about people who stopped hoarding when they discovered the hybrid middleground: debrid services, which cache torrents and usenet so they can be directly downloaded / streamed. you pay roughly the same per month as you would for the basic Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, etc. packages but on just one subscription, i.e. all the content for the price of one. the quality and reliability is better too (4K, 10bit, 7.1, atmos, CDN..)

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

#310

Post by pirate-Loo6uoDu »

Mo3 wrote: post #303
Cyph0n wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who do you think reuploads stuff after DMCA/NTD takedowns?

Im aware some people are busy hoarding data and providing it back to the ecosystem in these cases, but I fail to understand why or how the cost of this personal decision is in any way related to the cost of piracy, or why someone with this hobby would feel the need to complain about it, or publicly associate these costs with piracy itself. That’s illogical. It’s like mirroring Wikipedia on S3 and then publicly statin…

My copy of wikipedia is less than 100GB at the moment.
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