As an anecdote, take Ma vie en rose, a Belgian movie I wanted to watch. There is a tremendous amount of obscure, foreign, and rare content that cannot be found on public sources or streaming services. You can be confident you are downloading something decent on the first attempt. There are also usually limited slots for torrents in a particular group (e.g., on some sites, a single film may have one or two 1080P encodes, one or two 720P encodes, one remux of the Blu-ray, and one untouched disc unless there are multiple significantly different masters available), meaning lower-quality releases will be trumped, removing the need to compare releases and pick.

Often this means that each torrent has mandatory screenshots for video quality comparisons, consistent track orders for bilingual releases, MediaInfo/BDInfo to allow you to know the contents before downloading (e.g., codecs, languages, audio channels, bitrates, etc.), source information to know what version of a film or series you're watching, and full ripping logs in the case of CDs/vinyl, etc.

Quality control is unmatched many sites have strict rules on what can be uploaded and general standards of uploads. There is almost no need to use any VPN service on these sites. I think it is worth looking into private trackers for anyone a bit more interested in media than the average person. With the demographics of HN and some of the topics that come up often (e.g., Linux, privacy, nostalgia for old-school forums, weird little micro-optimizations of peoples' lifestyles to achieve the 'best' possible way to do a certain thing, etc.), I have always been a little bit surprised to see quite how many people personally use tools like Popcorn Time and how little mention of some forms of filesharing there is.

Popcorn time app reddit