A year or so ago, I posted a link that you can help Anna's Archive by seeding their torrents [0]. I monitored (eye-balled) their stats [1] to see whether there was a bump in seeding afterwards, and couldn't see one. So, the "low conversion" comment might be true.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40672215

[1] https://annas-archive.org/torrents

I don't think you can draw any conclusions from this. Maybe that the avg HNer does not have feel like allocating 500TB of space and bandwidth to host copyrighted material...

Lots of us browse from work where torrents aren't exactly allowed, or mobile where it's not practical