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Comment by pervycreeper | Hacker News Reader

I think it boils down to the culture of those kinds of sites, which reportedly encourage an elitist secret club type of mindset over one which encourages preservation or dissemination of information.

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You can try to critique the culture of What.CD but the truth is that WCD did a better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of 'preserving or disseminating information' would have done.

The mindset cultivated seeders with the fear of getting kicked out if one was a bad peer / leech; ratios, bounties and freeleech items created a gamification for uploading material and seeding otherwise unpopular items for other users.

...until it all was gone.

Why can't both those goals be combined?

Yeah but now that is all for nothing. They could release the torrent database but they're not gonna are they? There's just too much pride attached to it to let it go.

Well, the database contains data about users too... doing so would put users at risk. An interesting concept is ZeroNet [1], which allows entire websites to be shared in a peer to peer way.

[1] https://zeronet.io/

>WCD did a better job at preserving music than a community with the express purpose of 'preserving or disseminating information' would have done.

This appears to be the precise 180 degree opposite of what the case is as at 2 January 2017.

Interesting topic! People are ptobably also feeling more motivate to contribute in an isolated community than to some greater good perspective.

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