Was it? Serious question. I just skip the platform based stuff and still do torrents and release groups. Cross platform freedom.

It's been gravy for a dozen years, and will continue to be.

Perhaps all the money you gave them to make unpopular indoctrination themed shows inadvertently led to their downfall?

The only money video gets out of me is at the theatre, and I'm ok with that. I only have to support the stuff that looks good. I can choose to NOT give my money to garbage.

What are release groups?

It's a distributed hierarchy with rules. Every release group is a cell competing against every other release group. It's like the Mafia, you get respect for breaking releases.

Then the releases trickle down to the usenets and private and public torent trackers.

Some sights have rules to encourage speediness, like that only the first 1 or 2 releases per format/quality are allowed to be uploaded.

Nobody cares about second fastest. It's about getting shit out, and out fast.

The rules are designed to do that.