Before the tourist influx there would be near universal condemnation of both misuse of gov't resources to protect corporate profit and the suggestion that piracy means you're stealing eleventy billion potential dollars from some company. I'm not sure if this is a generation of corporate sycophants led around by the nose thanks to culture war and social media garbage or if the incursion of tourist newfags brought people here who never should have been exposed to this kind of place had thedonald or whatever youtuber not told them they could say nigger here, but either way its sad.

Anon used to stand for the oldfag hacker ethos and that we needed to modernize and eliminate a lot of the horribly restrictive, corpo favoring IP laws that
>MAFIAA
companies and the nascent game industry were leaning into more heavily. Invasive DRM like Starforce (the Denuvo of its era) were condemned rightly, as Denuvo should be today and invasive ring-zero anticheats.. Every single legitimate study of piracy shows that those who pirate the most also buy the most (assuming means; some favela dweller who couldn't afford a game in the first place of course doesn't count) which makes sense as people buy stuff that takes their interest, they want to support for one reason or another etc. Every time a pirate site got knocked offline there was generally the confidence that from every head cut two more would rise; and near universal condemnation for this waste of law enforcement resources especially if someone isn't trying to sell bootlegs/access to them etc. These days however, so much shit was done in insular Discord faggotry that gets lost if its shut down and other failures of both organization and technical nature, like scene crackers being replaced by those who only do so for profit- something that was anathema in the old days. Some responses still maintain some hope thankfully, but seeing a thread like this shows the degree of cancer's metastasis