JDPoZ
It won't die. It will just hollow out. Same as Digg. Same as Facebook, Twitter, and every other shitty part of the internet. The power users are what make the internet the magical place it is. Without those people, the sites will still work... but they won't be as great as they were before their respective turning points. It's a cycle it seems.
It's not even that people want stuff "for free."
I mean... well... who doesn't love free stuff, but really if the legit product is priced fairly and buying it provides some actual useful service and isn't inconvenient or comes packaged with scummy garbage hindering it, then people will pay for it.
The problem is - that's not what publicly-traded companies like to do. Valve's Gabe Newell said it best (paraphrasing) - "Piracy is a problem with a service... not the customer."
Shitty services or actions businesses take to place a barrier of any kind between customer and the product they seek as a means to lazily extract more money from customers - especially that which is perceived as greedy will make more people seek alternative means of obtaining said product.
Ask people who host Plex servers why they put movies on their server when they already have a Blu-Ray of it.
It's always "because the disc has un-skippable ads" or "they didn't include Ben Affleck's commentary track on it where he shits on Michael Bay for being a goddamn moron," or "I don't like seeing 14 different warnings before watching the movie I like" or "I don't like seeing 10 min of ads every 5 min of watching my favorite show."
It's hardly ever "I like being a thief" or "I couldn't afford it..." and in the case of the latter, they weren't going to buy it anyway.
Same. Love this guy. His video about how those roll-around "portable" HVAC units being hot garbage made me both upset I had ever used one, and also excited about the future of heat pumps... then he started doing more videos on heat pumps!