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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but it's not used anymore, from what I know. Few places use it for distribution, I guess they don't consider it worth the hassle. Blizzard was using it to distribute binaries.

I guess mobile internet was its downfall as few people want to seed from a mobile connection.

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There are vast data archives exposed through private trackers that work on top of bittorrent. This isn't widely known due to their private, invite-only (and in some cases, entirely closed) nature but the fact remains that these exist and are fundamental in multiple, widely divergent communities.

Can you give some examples? It all sounds very... mysterious. At least, what kind of content are we talking about?

A public example is rutracker.org. Another is sci-hub. See Joe Karaganis for some cannonical info: http://piracy.americanassembly.org/shadow-libraries/

There's also The Internet Archive that provides torrents that's in the clearnet.

Music, movies, tv, video games, books. Some trackers specialize in one type of content, some have everything.

Finding URLs of private trackers is trivial in google. Getting an invite usually requires knowing another user, unless they temporarily open signups for everyone.

Here's one of many lists of private trackers

https://hdvinnie.github.io/Private-Trackers-Spreadsheet/

Lots of companies use BT in a datacenter environment to efficiently distribute binaries to a large number of hosts.

Again, this is in the context of the original BitTorrent hype. Which was huge. What you're mentioning is small potatoes.

Again it’s not small potatoes if the protocol is widely used. There is no strict definition of what kind of data can be used with BitTorrent. And because you only know of a few public examples doesn’t make the protocol unused, abandoned, or any less significant.

>I guess mobile internet was its downfall as few people want to seed from a mobile connection.

CGNAT has a lot to answer for, too

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