The people who didn't know about these site before probably didn't practice piracy at all anyway, so having this list of blocked websites won't help them now anyway as they can't access them easily now anyway.
So IMHO these blocks mainly work at stopping Average Joes from accessing low-friction, low hanging fruit piracy and annoying them enough that they'd rather give Netflix 12 Euros than learn how to bypass these annoying restrictions.
You are probably right, it’s just funny that there’s a public list saying „don’t go there“ which kinda acts like a „forbidden books“ list making it more interesting.
For broke kids with more free time than money, yeah learning to access forbidden pirate sites is cool and interesting, but since Austria is a relatively high income country, most people I know here don't bother with piracy at all and just pay for content anyway.
So blocks like these will definitely discourage more Average Joes from low hanging fruit piracy and keep them as law-abiding paying customers rather than turning them into "hackers".
Austrian checking in, the problem with the "high income" logic is that most stuff offered over here is just pretty crappy.
The libraries of streaming services are tiny compared to international offerings and some don't even offer anything in Austria at all because it's a small market.
Pirating is still alive and well, not necessarily because people can't/don't want to afford the alternatives, but because they just aren't as convenient.
But as an Austrian myself, piracy was alive and well when I was in the age group where that usually happens and many "regular" people used free streaming sites when kino.to and others were still popular.
It does actually work really great. With old sites going down from time to time and DMCA requests making it difficult to find new piracy sites via search engines, having a list is very convenient.
People who need to use that list of blocked websites usually have no idea of VPNs. And vide versa. People used to VPNs already know the pirate sites and don't need that list.
I think you are underestimating the popularity of VPNs these days, just watching a YouTube video for "regular" people will have NordVPN, ExpressVPN ads on them advertising them as good for "privacy" or watching Netflix while you are on vacation. It's not a technology only accessible to nerds for a long time.
Thats the misconception i was talking about. Unless you are traveling the high seas regularly, you will sooner or later get into the situation, that you come back and all your links are dead.
The people who didn't know about these site before probably didn't practice piracy at all anyway, so having this list of blocked websites won't help them now anyway as they can't access them easily now anyway.
So IMHO these blocks mainly work at stopping Average Joes from accessing low-friction, low hanging fruit piracy and annoying them enough that they'd rather give Netflix 12 Euros than learn how to bypass these annoying restrictions.