I remember a Reddit post talking about how predatory this game was

Honestly reddit.com/r/usenet was the best but we know how that’s going. You can web search but basically you pay for a provider, sign up for indexers who are like torrent trackers and provide .nzb files. You use either SABnzbd or NZBGet to download the actual files. Sonarr and Radarr are automation tools. There’s some other concepts like retention and backbones but that’s not as important to get started.

https://frugalusenet.com/ is a good provider to get started. https://www.nzbgeek.info/ and https://nzbplanet.net/ are good indexers for beginners. I recommend SABnzbd over NZBGet as I don’t think get is actively being developed for anymore.

https://trash-guides.info/ is very good for Sonarr/Radarr set up but it can be quite overwhelming for non-technical users or beginners.

I also just remembered cache exists so poke around https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZU9NxnpPelwJ:https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/wiki/faq/&cd=10&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

I gave up on torrents a while ago and just focus on Usenet. It cost money (~$3/mo for a provider and another ~$2-3/mo for indexers) but it’s encrypted and doesn’t rely on P2P.

Also don’t forget that DVDs exist if you want to go a more legal route.

You also aren’t reliant on someone else running an instance that could go down at any time, either permanently or an outage.

You have to worry about it yourself though.

I see that so much in games these days. I’m fine with a game that improves a formula but it’s clear there’s a lot of just straight up inferior copying going on.

I should say that Reddit without RES would probably be much closer to what I’m seeing on Lemmy now.

Why? It’s a less mature platform with less features and not enough content. I get the idea of it being attractive but it’s like Mastadon without the content you’ve got an uphill climb.