I don’t live in the US, so my ISP doesn’t really seem to care what I torrent, but the megathread vehemently recommends to always use one. Since VPNs aren’t cheap and I’m on a strict budget (wouldn’t pirate otherwise), is it really that dangerous to torrent without one?
Yes but it’s not quite as easy. For example, QxR generally releases everything on 1337. On Usenet you’re going to get a mix of re-ups, remixes from various groups, new groups you haven’t heard of, and they might be on various indexers. Generally speaking, I have no issues finding a good quality x265 rip, but I might have to try a couple if I haven’t heard of the release team. For this reason I’ve configured preferences in Radarr and Sonarr which will preference QxR, for example. I also include public torrent trackers.