How many people really discover new music through piracy?
Everyone I've ever known. I mostly listen to metal, which undeniably became what it is because of people mailing pirated cassettes in the early 80s. 8 of my 10 favorite bands, I discovered by finding someone with good taste on Soulseek and grabbing the stuff I'd never heard of before. Piracy is key in the spread of underground music.
Artists that sell out stadiums wouldn't be affected much, but the ones that actually need the concert income absolutely would.
The Plex watchlists seemed stupid and pointless to me...until someone pointed out you can subscribe to your Plex watchlist in Radarr/Sonarr. Now, I can watch trailers on Plex, add stuff, and it shows up automatically when released. Super convenient.
For what it's worth, I opted to wait until I had my first issue with PIA after the buyout to switch and it just never really happened. I've remained on PIA for my sea-sailing needs, and still haven't had an ISP email or other problem with them, other than the client being a little janky on occasion.
I'm not an active advocate or anything, but my experience is that they're still good enough, even years after the acquisition. Perhaps they're using the data for something behind the scenes, but it's cheap and keeps my ISP off my back. I'd at least still consider it in the "good enough for this purpose" category.
I think it incredibly damaging in the long run to have 50% of active users on this platform to be centralized on one domain.
I agree, but 50% is still better than 100%. I definitely appreciate that I'm reading about this while being totally unaffected personally rather than just disappearing entirely like what happens with a banned subreddit.
Yeah, I vaguely remember it making the news in the 90s, and I stopped standing at that point. I had one teacher tell me once it was "required" that I stand. I just said "no thanks" and continued sitting, and he dropped it.
It wasn't a big protest in my case though. I normally had a CD player stuffed in my belt, and standing made it more likely to fall out and get noticed. I generally avoided standing as much as possible in those days.