IMO their algorithm is ass. The front page is always all plastic titties and shitty step-porn and I actively click "not interested’ on those.

Subscribing to channels/creators is useful enough to warrant creating an account though. I do wish the subs page wasn’t so limited

Pirating VHS casettes was very common, but I think that pretty much died with the VHS format. Music CDs got ripped a fair bit until car stereos were able to play mp3 format from CDs and later USBs.

I don’t think rental DVD ripping was ever common, torrents were already popular by that time and it was easier (and often less issues with quality and formats) to just download already encoded movies.