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Comment by hamiltont | Hacker News Reader

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hamiltont·

Does anyone understand the reasoning behind this statement:

> We would like to avoid the blind mirroring of all data.

Found at http://academictorrents.com/about.php#mirroring

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Sometimes people upload 1TB files which are not intended to be mirrored or not of interest to many people. We don't want people who donate hosting to mirror this content unless they really want to. But we also want to make it easy and automatic to mirror content. Using collections, which each have an RSS feed, content can be curated by someone you trust to decide what should be mirrored. I curate many collections including videos lectures, deep learning, and medical datasets.

Isn't this the purpose of IPFS? You get to host what you want.

Got it. Not trying to knock the hard work put into this, I'm actually thrilled to see this initiative and only intend to be constructive. Personally, I would rather be asked to trust that site admins were auditing each torrent to ensure it at least looks legitimate, before passing final legal responsibility on to me as a seeder. Leaving users to identify contributors they can trust to never include "Pirated Movie 2018" into their donated seedbox sounds like quite a hurdle to attracting new seeders willing to participate in a "legitimate bittorrent use case" project.

We perform our own audits of all data and request a justification why it is academic data if it appears to be "Movie 2018". We think the collections model is the best balance between a walled garden and zero censorship. You can be assured that no collections curated by me will have a bad torrent in it! Here are a few:

http://academictorrents.com/collection/medical

http://academictorrents.com/collection/video-lectures

http://academictorrents.com/collection/joes-recommended-mirr...

http://academictorrents.com/collection/computer-vision

http://academictorrents.com/collection/deep-learning

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