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Comment by mawalu | Hacker News Reader

You mean beside being responsible for ~50% of the global internet traffic in 2009? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent

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Yeah, but what's the current number? I'd be surprised if it were more than 5-10% these days. 2009 was 11 years ago, the internet was a much smaller and less regulated place.

Even if it were only 5-10% of internet traffic, that’d be huge! Think about how much the internet has exploded in use since 2009.

Youtube is 37% of all mobile traffic. [1]

[1]- https://www.statista.com/chart/17321/global-downstream-mobil...

that is still way WAY more than enough to justify it's utility.

You think that if something once took up 50% of all traffic on the internet it never found a practical application?

> proportionate to the attendant hype

From the original comment.

Also, just because it was 50% at some point, it doesn't really matter today. Paraphrasing, a technology is only as good as it's latest match result.

Perl was once powering the web, nowadays you have to look at the web with an electronic microscope to find it...

This is silly. Are you actually saying that bittorrent was hyped so much that constituting half the internet was a letdown? And that Perl didn't live up to its hype because it's only common today, and not as universal as it once was?

> This is silly. Are you actually saying that bittorrent was hyped so much that constituting half the internet was a letdown?

My point is that it was a fad, it's barely used anymore and it was 50% in 2009, now its usage is much, much lower. I've seen a lot of statistics of streaming services being 20-30% of the internet each (Netflix, Youtube), so I'd be amazed if BitTorrent is more than 10% 2020 (and that's a very generous estimate), as I said previously. Anyway, it doesn't matter, there are a lot of techs that were super hyped and in the end, faded away. SOAP, CORBA, XML databases, semantic web techs (RDF, etc.), RSS, ...

> And that Perl didn't live up to its hype because it's only common today, and not as universal as it once was?

Perl is not common, it's uncommon. Let's say you're a developer in one of 100 big cities around the world, how likely it is for you to find a job developing Perl web apps? I'd say that in 80-90 of those, you can't even find that job. That's not a common tech in 2020 ;-)

Pogs were a fad. Bittorrent took downloading large files from being an unreliable pain to being effortless.

Perl was not a 'fad', it was what powered the internet's dynamic sites in the early days. Foundational technologies that eventually are hidden from the average person is not what 'fad' refers to.

Just because you don't use something doesn't mean it isn't used. You keep digging in to nonsense. (Also total internet bandwidth usage has increased significantly over time).

I use BT much more than 5 years ago since most popular content was removed from Netflix. Many folks here have said the same.

That makes zero sense. How much of the entire internet should have been bittorrent to live up to the "hype". Also what hype are you talking about? I only remember bittorrent gaining traction because it worked. Where is your idea of hype coming from?

Insofar as the majority of that traffic is likely illegal (in terms of sharing pirated property) I would not consider it useful.

It's not legal, therefore it's not practical? That doesn't make any sense at all.

useful != legal

This falls apart when you examine prohibited goods. Guns are illegal in most countries because they are very useful.

Are they though? I'm 38 and can't remember a situation in my life where a gun would have been useful. Not saying that I can't imagine such situations, I just find it a slightly weird example to make this point.

I also don't think that a fishing pole is useful, but that's because I don't like to fish. With a gun I could

* defend myself

* rob you

* murder you very effectively

* enjoy target shooting

* hunt wild game

* provide peace of mind in troubled times when law and order break down

The fewer guns there are per capita, the more useful they become for criminals. They are so useful, in fact, that people will spend a lot of money and subject themselves to costly and invasive regulations just to buy one gun. If no one found them useful, no one would find it necessary to ban them.

> I would not consider it useful.

Perhaps you meant (and people should have charitably interpreted you as meaning) "I would consider it to have no legitimate uses" or "... no uses worth supporting".

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