get your credit card stolen.

Let’s see… I don’t provide my credit card to anyone when pirating. The only way they are getting my credit card is breaking into my house. (no, mkv files can’t have viruses).

But I do need to provide my credit card info to HBO, which they store, on their likely poorly secured servers.

The number of credit cards stones from data leaks very likely exceeds the number of them stolen because someone got duped when trying to pirate.

That could indicate a lot of things. It would be very difficult to distinguish a torrent from something like cloud folder sync. And that would still be a statistical guess. No ISP is going to go after customers because their VPN traffic is potentially torrent traffic.

Besides, even if they could detect that torrenting is taking place, they will not know what data is being transferred from and to where. It’s a meme, but torrents are actually sometimes used for non-copyright infringing data.

I disagree entirely.

Gatekeeping has a negative connotation to it, and it can be used negatively. But gatekeeping is also necessary if you want to maintain a good community.

The increase of ease of use of social media and internet at large, and making it available to the very general public is what caused social media to become a toxic waste dump of misinformation, low effort content and lack of critical thought.

The difference of quality of reddit between 10 years ago and today is absolutely staggering. Reddit is practically unusable outside of small communities.

The relative difficulty of using the internet acted as a natural gatekeeping mechanism to keep your racist uncle Bob and your antivax aunt Karen away. Now they can join by clicking a few buttons on their phone.

Since that no longer works, the communities need to take gatekeeping into their own hands. Otherwise, it can be overrun by people people who are just stupid, to be frank.