Comment by anguswithgusto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anguswithgusto | Hacker News Reader

A real tragedy. More than a torrent tracker, What.cd was a beautiful, vibrant, and positive community. Knowing someone in real-life who was a fellow What.cd'er was enough to form an immediate friendship. (Knowing someone who'd give you an invite was another way ;)

I found high-fidelity versions of albums, singles and EPs I couldn't find anywhere else on What.cd. It was faster, more thorough, and cleaner than every other music resource (let alone torrent tracker) around. When I was young and broke, it was my primary way of engaging with music, discovering bands that I'd never heard of, and to this very day remained a crucial part of my music discovery "stack".

With that said, What.cd had been dying a slow death for a while now. With the rise of Spotify et al., the need for a private torrent tracker and the requisite accessories (seedboxes, external HDs) has been dimming. What.cd used to be far-and-away my #1 music resource; today it was probably the 3rd or 4th, suitable for finding obscure releases or ones unavailable on streaming sites because of byzantine licensing deals. Back in the day though, What.cd was THE SPOT for hearing popular releases before anyone else. Today, leaks are less prominent, as labels have gotten tighter about protecting their music, and musicians have gotten savvier and prefer to "leak stuff" themselves. For that reason, total download numbers on What.cd have been in decline for years, the community has gotten a bit quieter, although it's still been an extremely valuable resource to fill in the gaps between all the big music streamers.

A truly sad day. RIP What.cd. You will be missed.

id say the primary reason for the decline of what.cd downloads was their draconian ratio restrictions, meaning that as a new account (or even old, if you weren't able to take advantage of free leech from times past, which quickly dried up into "neutral leech" without granting ratio) it was almost impossible to actually use the site.

What.cd's ratio model was zero sum, so in order for you to get ratio, somebody else has to lose it. In Economic terms that means the entire "ratio economy" freezes up and its very hard to do much of anything.

It was a continual, deep flaw with the site that admins refused to acknowledge, i hope any successors keep it in mind.

Getting punished for actually using the site and seeding makes no sense whatsoever.

This restriction hindered my usage of the site for a long time, and I ended up "getting around it" by actively waiting for freeleech events and grabbing as much as I possibly could during that time. With everyone else downloading as well, it was entirely possible to build up significant upload credit.

One way to get upload credit was to get the users who exploited the ambient genre by automatically downloading every ambient album to download fabricated paulstretch albums.

How hard is it to find a couple of popular items and host those for a bit/few days? Easy way to build ratio karma.

I was a What.cd member years ago (early college) and had two issues: 1) disk space, 2) connectivity/laptop

It was hard to maintain content long enough to seed if you want to consume content but don't have much disk space. And with just a laptop it can be hard to keep an internet connection to seed.

Eventually it became more effort than it was worth and I just used the top charts to find the music elsewhere. tbh I haven't since found a better source for high quality music recommendations.

Very. Even downloading new releases on the top charts, I found that I could only get about 1-5% seeded in an entire month. Unless you're one of the first 10 people to start seeding that torrent, it's basically hopeless to get a high ratio just from that.

Freeleeches (you get upload credit, without being counted for downloads, in the same way), tokens (get to download a free item), and uploading original material (you get credit (potentially) without ever having downloaded) would inject new resources into the economy. Also having someone leave the site with <1 ratio effectively injects resources. However, If someone with a surplus left, it would hurt.

edit: just explaining terms for non site members, but you're right, definitely something you need to get right. Too strict and the economy dies, too permissive and there isn't incentive.

I lost my account there many years ago due to leaving torrents behind, and I had a few TB surplus ratio, and I've learned many times that I'm not a special snowflake, so I tend to agree with GP, that ratio game really stifled the flow of data(if flow is the metric you want to reach). True of most private trackers.

A friend of mine was once a member of a similar tracker geared towards television (though I cannot seem to think of the name of it right now) where there were no ratios, only a minimum amount of time required to seed after a leech. He said that this system worked a bit better than the classic ratio system.

People say this, but imo building ratio on What was easy.

There are people who use Private Trackers who don't understand the point, don't give back to the community, only seed things they personally want, and wonder why they have a hard time building ratio...basically use it like a public tracker that they can get "locked out" of.

i uploaded dozens of albums to what.cd, it didn't help with my ratio in the slightest, because some seed-box grabs one copy, then they take all the rest of the ratio because they have much faster internet than me. Out of everything i uploaded, with all qualities/encodes included, i got maybe 2-3GB of ratio.

Again, what is the point of a torrent site that punishes you for actually using it, even if you are fully willing to contribute via seeding, or albums, etc.

As a heavy user for years, sorry, the what.cd system was fundamentally broken if you didn't have a fast seed-box to slurp up ratio fron everyone else. Because its zero sum, the seedboxes win, and everyone else loses. Which is totally insane when bits are 100% free things that can be copied endlessly, isn't that the whole point of BitTorrent to begin with?!

I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks. I had the upload and actually had to wait out the time restriction. I had uploaded and transcoded/cross-seeded hundreds of albums.

You have to give a lot more than you take - and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.

> and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.

Are they? Surely after a certain point, adding more bandwidth to the network doesn't make a difference. If you add another fast seedbox, maybe some people could download an album 5 seconds faster, but that's only if they could pay the ratio for the album in the first place, which they might not be able to if they weren't a seedbox user themselves. I think what.cd had more than enough seedboxes and that it probably would have been more important to the community to upload new 100% FLAC rips or seed unpopular or poorly seeded torrents than to add another seedbox that just auto-snatched popular/2016 releases and freeleech torrents.

> I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks.

Remember, not everyone has a good enough home internet connection to do this. Back-of-the-napkin calculations say, even if I spent the whole time uploading at full speed, my shitty 0.5 Mb/s connection would still take more than 2 weeks to upload 100GB.

Which is why low cost seedboxes exist.

last time i checked 100GB of storage with 1-2TB caps at 1GB in and out was close to $5 month

You can pay in bitcoin if you're concerned about "privacy" but they all take paypal.

Point is, there's no low-powered user option. You can't be a casual and survive. I can't just engage every few months when I feel like it if I have to pay a subscription. A user has to put in a lot of effort BEFORE they get anything out, and then has to keep up that effort.

What use is a glorious library if you have to work there for free a few days a week before they let you read any of the books?

There's not quite true, you could download tens of gigabytes with no minimum ratio required at all as long as you seeded them.

>A user has to put in a lot of effort BEFORE they get anything out, and then has to keep up that effort.

Fill a request whenever you need more upload. There are many low hanging fruits for 25-75GB and $15-35. Requests are "high value" uploads that don't rely on you seeding to multiple people, just uploading and claiming the reward. Very low effort and sometimes the requester even links you to where you can purchase the material.

Requested uploads hold more value to the community (or at least a single member) than {random local band that had two shows and gave out poorly mixed CD's one time}.

I always felt so annoyed at the stupidity of the ratio requirements that I do feel some vague satisfaction imaging that it destroyed them (I have no idea what actually happened to cause a shutdown). Everyone buying seedboxes so that they could have fast enough internet to actually earn ratio was ridiculous.

Broadcasthenet still has no ratio requirements at all and is doing fine.

> I have no idea what actually happened to cause a shutdown

Their servers were raided by the French authorities.

News at http://gizmodo.com/authorities-just-shut-down-what-cd-the-be...

Broadcast the net has a very strict 1 week seeding policy on every download though which makes having a dedicated seedbox almost a requirement. Having been flush with what.cdupload after stocking up years ago on big freeleech files, I kinda preferred the ratio model but can definitely see how it could be restricting for new users.

This was definitely an issue at PTP. You start off with whatever you got invited with as a gift, and if you don't start making up ground quickly, you're basically in a hole, except by freeleech. I realized I had to pay attention to freeleech and participate that way, which worked pretty well, until I built up a suitable buffer, but it takes some doing.

The rule changes made... around 2 years ago now I think? Kinda made this complaint obsolete.

They changed it to allow your ratio to dip well below the "required" ratio as long as you kept seeding. Keeping your ratio up wasn't strictly necessary anymore - though it was still required to keep your "rank" and the little perks that came with that. The admins did this largely in response to their inability to "fix" the ratio economy that overly disadvantaged people with low bandwidth.

It's like we discover the lessons of the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op [1] over and over again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Babysitting_Co-op

Hasn't heard of this before. Really interesting!

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

Spot on.

the point you make is one of the key reasons why what was so good.

the currency was upload

i only bought music so i could exchange it for a the more valuable upload it gave me.

gutted

I'm very worried about the content. So many recordings in my library are sourced there; many aren't available anywhere else, not on the internet or in stores. A sad day indeed.

Soulseek is alive still somehow, and has a solid selection of rarities.

I just commented this below. Soulseek is amazing! Returned to it after years recently - I remembered the Mac version sucked. Now it's great.

Haven't been let down yet and I listen to a lot of rare experimental stuff.

It's good to hear it's gotten better. I haven't actually used Soulseek in years, but there's a few things in my library I haven't seen anywhere else. I have mp3s from Soulseek that are as old as middle school kids, that's a weird thought.

Really? I forgot all about it. Thanks!

I had roughly the same reaction when I saw it was still up fairly recently haha. Waffles' problems had me thinking about the evolution of p2p over the years (downloading LimeWire Pro with LimeWire was my favorite), and I was pleasantly surprised to see them still chugging along.

I guess, back to shitty MP3 rips again :-(

Anybody looking to know more about the origins/organization behind What.cd would do well to check out Stephen Witt's monumental book on the subject: How Music Got Free (https://www.amazon.com/How-Music-Got-Free-Obsession/dp/01431...)

Wasn't Oink before What? I still have an oink hoodie...

I remember the day Oink went down. Sad, but What.cd grew out of it.

I think this is a good opportunity and time for the rebuild - WCD's front-end infrastructure and database was a spaghetti of PHP and hastily constructed database architecture and the API's left a bit to be desired - though the underlying C++ driving the tracker is probably still pretty solid.

Thank you for this.

I've been a WCD member since 2010. It was my first private tracker. I enjoyed the flavor of the WCD atmosphere, could taste the quality of volume after volume of the essential, goofy, ridiculous and down right trash this amazing site had to offer. What's the old saying? "One man's trash is another man's treasure". From sublime to sensuous; from ordinary to extraordinary; from books to manuscripts, with a keen eye and a sense of self worth, the world was at your fingertips. What.CD was more than just a music site on a private tracker. It was a community...a family! There were people who had resources of commonality and rarity that if you knew how to connect, maaan you had the world on a string.

I refuse to believe such riches are lost forever. WCD will be back in one form or another, and when it returns I hope to be there to greet the new with an open heart and open arms!

What are your #1, 2 and 3 music resources now?

Spotify (by a large margin), then YouTube (for discovery) and /mu/ (for community).

I still used What.cd for music I wanted offline access to (for running, flights, etc.) as well as the occasional leak or obscurity. But before I got Spotify I was downloading multiple albums a day.

Spotify really sucks for discovery! After 4 songs you will be listening to vague (not tailored) musical hits that seems to be recommended by someone discovering music for the first time. Pathetic!

Is that you, Donald Trump?

Nah, I just like good music. If you don't, you can't understand this.

You really ought to give Spotify Discover a chance - my Discover tab is amazing - it feeds me a constant stream of new wave, dream pop, outsider music, early electronic music, ambient, underground rap - stuff that I like, but haven't heard. The more you use Spotify, the better Discover gets. Don't write it off before giving it enough data to help you.

The radios I find to be pretty shit for me (I read somewhere that Google Play Music has a better version of that). However the "Discover Weekly" feature on Spotify I've been very happy with and every week I have new music to listen to and it's mostly things I like.

Maybe it's worse for recommending certain genres? I know my friend complains about its hardstyle recommendations.

1. rutracker

2. /mu/ archive (sometimes obscure stuff can be found in sharethreads)

3. everywhere else (TPB, DC, Soulseek...)

4. Spotify for when I'm not at my machine

Is anyone ignoring the existence of last.fm (with regards to music discovery only)?

To me it's has always been the best recommendation engine ever, hands down, compared to all others (Spotify, Deezer, ecc).

It works by tracking what users with similar tastes are actually listening to (they call this feature scrobbling) which allows them to provide further recommendations and let you adventure on unexplored territory.

Then on your profile you will have a YouTube player playing all those recommendations, or a custom tag, genre, and so on.

It also has a great community where you can see how much you are musically compatible with other users.

Funny, I didn't realize Spotify had a 1-click integration with Last.fm. Scrobbling now for the first time in over a year, thanks for the reminder!

I loved last.fm, but a few years ago they changed their interface and I guess my resistance to change turned me off of the site.

For discovery?

- My bandcamp feed - we have a great community of like minded music lovers over there. And while I keep track of new releases anyway, Bandcamp will notify me of new release by my favorite labels.

- Small, human curated, online record stores. Piccadilly Records, Soul Jazz Records, Norman Records, clone.nl, Pacific Beach Vinyl, Red Eye Records, Phonica. You don't have to buy there if you prefer digital releases - I do and still value the selection and recommendations.

- magazine / review sites. Testpressing.org, Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Fact, Music Is My Sanctuary, Stomp The Wax, Inverted Audio, A closer listen and many more. Of course that's my taste, but there are sites catering to every niche music interest. Find yours.

And when it comes to buying I require lossless audio, which thankfully isn't a problem these days:

- Bandcamp

- Boomkat

- Bleep

- Qobuz

- Label stores

- Physical copies from online or local record shops if there isn't a digital release available.

Pretty much in that order.

I have exactly the same set of sites for getting music. For electronic music, if you're fast and follow what's happening it's pretty easy to buy all the music you want. If you miss a release from a name like Ricardo Villalobos or one of the Romanians, good luck buying them from discogs with hundreds of euros. What.cd of course had them available.

For other music, I usually check http://dr.loudness-war.info/ for the best version and try to buy that from somewhere. Discogs used cds are a cheap and easy way to get the non-remastered versions delivered, stores like Qobuz usually only have the most recent remastering and nothing else.

Some artists like Björk have their best versions released only as rare double vinyl prints. For these what.cd was the only option if you didn't want to spend hundreds of euros to a couple of albums.

> If you miss a release from a name like Ricardo Villalobos or one of the Romanians, good luck buying them from discogs with hundreds of euros. What.cd of course had them available.

Yes, I'm not a fan of vinyl-only releases either. Whenever I have to buy vinyl, I do it rather reluctantly - while I actually like the idea of physical releases, I know I'll rip it, add it to my digital library and consume it from there. It's a necessity rather than a pleasure, but I'm not willing to pass on those Mood Hut or Music From Memory releases, let alone old rarities.

I have my turntables, a mixer and hundreds of vinyls. I've been recording them to flac format throughout the year and decided I prefer buying flac instead of physical if possible. Such a waste of resources to press plastic copies. The only plus I have to give for vinyl is that it forces the mix to be not that loud what the digital copy can be...

Do you think Spotify played a role in supporting the French police?

What.cd was an incredibly potent force for disseminating leaks. One can reasonably suspect that the closure of What.cd will slow the velocity of music piracy, and give more power to streamers/labels when it comes to marketing a new release.

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