[alwayslikethis]

I believe this is what kept it relatively low profile despite the scale. There is far more copyright enforcement and attention paid to English language sites compared to non-English languages. China has had their own crackdowns, and the totalitarian system cannot allow freedom of information, so there are no good torrent sites in China either. This leaves Russian sites most unencumbered, with the high quality moderation on the forum making the directory safe to use.

[grishka]

Copyright in Russia is only enforced for companies in practice. For most individuals, piracy is the default way of getting movies and TV shows, especially now that we no longer have Netflix. Music is more complicated — there's still Yandex and VK offering paid subscriptions (and all kinds of bypass methods to listen for free). No idea what people use for music now. We've had Spotify for like 1.5 years too and many people subscribed to it and were happy with it but then you know what happened.