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Comment by jxub | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm going off tangent, but the social dynamics associated with torrenting are pretty darn interesting.

On one hand, they seem to converge towards a consensus with most seeded and downloaded files and popularity as a trust factor. On the other, they also promote the dissemination of ideas the knowledge of which poses a threat to the status quo that is, the state towards which a society was coerced to.

On one hand, Torrents are about rejecting the Publisher and Big Media status but on the other they are about arriving to a democratic status about which films/books/... are the best or most useful.

And don't even get me started about the constant ethical dilemmas associated with sharing and who should control or own the data.

To link all that threads into a broader topic, we could associate the torrent subculture to the Dionysian archetype which Nietzsche wrote about.

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>On the other, they also promote the dissemination of ideas the knowledge of which poses a threat to the status quo that is, the state towards which a society was coerced to.

Actually, one of the biggest uses of torrents is to disseminate pop culture materials that fall right in the middle of US culture. Probably dwarfing "radical" stuff by many orders of magnitude.

Does popular hip hop music threaten or promote the status quo?

It does the latter.

Only when it was unpopular did it do the former.

Popularity was brought about by its being templated, packaged, and sold, thus bringing it into the status quo's portfolio.

That is ignoring that a sufficiently motivated actor can ensure that doesn't happen.

In one of my private trackers there is a person with a seedbox that downloads every single torrent as soon as it is uploaded, and they have been doing so for quite a few years now.

This ensures that while some things will indeed, be seeded more, nothing quite vanishes.

Then again the form media of that specific tracker is fairly small, so it is not prohibitively expensive to archive everything. One raw ISO Blueray movie file elsewhere could be thousands upon thousands of torrents in that specific tracker.

Maybe something of utility would be creating a distributed torrent system that is a bit more closely tied to the tracker. Where membership would require you to integrate to the swarm by automatically downloading a percentage of the entire corpus, ensuring the health of the tracker.

So a new peer would be bearing part of the load of having everything be accessible.

I think this would require decently heavy curation, but I could see how it could be useful for something like the OP specifically, where having scientific papers lost for good would be a shame.

There were a lot of trackers where you had rating, which would depend on the range of titles available from you and your prowess at disseminating them. But really, torrents work just fine even without those measures, even for niche content.

The absence of rules is anarchic, but not democratic. In anarchy, the powerful coerce, manipulate, and otherwise dominate the masses, creating a status quo that the powerful desire, and abusing the weak without restraint. Historically, the outcome is despots, warlords, feudalism, and brutality. In democracy everyone has an equal vote and equal rights, and it requires a system of rules.

Many had the same hopes for the Internet and social media, for example. But when these things became valuable - influential - powerful interests acted to control and manipulate them, to obtain money, political power and social outcomes. It's hard to claim that the results are that people are choosing information that is "the best or most useful".

I think politics and social outcomes, such as status quos, are unavoidable results of human interaction. Eliminating rules eliminates the protection against arbitrary power and returns us to the world of despots. The politics is unavoidable; the question is, how do we want to manage it?

EDIT: Some major edits; sorry if you read an earlier version.

Fwiw, modern anarchism tends to emphasize consensus decision making and building strong process; the Greek root after all is "without leaders," not "without rules."

Modern democracy, with its focus on leaders and representation, still gives us extreme power and economic imbalances and is arguably a barely disguised oligarchy.

I think we agree that getting rid of all the rules is a bad thing, though.

For me torrenting is mostly just about its stigma for being illegal on the one side and its very competitive performance on the other side.

So as soon as someone distributes some data via a torrent, everybody starts asking if it is legal to use that data. When the data is offered via a download link on some website, most people assume that they got the data through a legal channel.

> For me torrenting is mostly just about its stigma for being illegal on the one side

There are still legitimate reasons to use torrents apart from piracy. I particularly like the physibles section of TPB https://thepiratebay.org/browse/605 which are not inherently illegal (well apart from the 3D printable guns which are a bit iffy and in a legal gray area).

Though they do tend to be largely useless. Like some banned books, people download them just to have them.

I work with a slowly changing dataset that's about 100GB to download in full. A few people a week download it.

I've considered adding a torrent download, because it includes built-in verification of the download. A common problem is users reporting that their download over HTTP is corrupt, but I'm not sure if they'd be able or want to use Bittorrent.

(Also, for many users the download is probably fine, but they can't open it in Excel. Bittorrent won't help that. )

For 100GB of important data I'd be willing to buy an extra hard drive.

I'd expect your users to be willing to set up a torrent client. It's not even difficult.

It's not that difficult, but it can be scary.

The few times I've published files over bittorrent I've had to reassure people that torrenting itself isn't any more illegal than other download methods.

It's also not clear ahead of time how difficult it's going to be.

If torrenting is the only way, some people won't bother.

That's what I'm concerned with; tarnishing a good reputation with a "scary" word.

Bandwidth is no problem for us, we have a faster connection than all the users. Users in Africa and Latin America would probably benefit most, but I'd need to research whether they'd be prepared to use Bittorrent before implementing this.

The torrent download sounds like a great application for this -- hopefully it can take some strain off your servers as well. Linux distributions mostly do this. Only thing is how you want to deal with updates to the dataset.

You might want to look into something like syncthing. It uses a distributed protocol like torrents but also supports updating files to new versions while only resyncing the diff and sharing folders. Open source, donation-funded.

https://syncthing.net/

What would really help torrenting would be to build it into browsers as an alternative http(s) transport for large files (instead of/to augment CDNs). If Warner and Sony found themselves automatically torrenting their content and their bandwidth bills falling would they change their attitude?

I'm quite sure it would not at all change their position on torrenting copyrighted works without permission.

I definitely agree with that, but they have pushed a narrative that "torrenting is inherently bad and should be blocked by ISPs/firewalls/etc" which means it's hard to use as a transport for software updates, video delivery and the like.

Why does torrenting have to be all these things? Why can't it just be a distributed file sharing scheme?

It is a file sharing scheme, these are just the human dynamics that stem from it.

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