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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

Always makes me sad remembering what was lost when What.CD went offline.

And Oink before it. But the torch has been passed to the next community, not all has been lost

While not all has been lost, I strongly feel that every time the community migrates from one platform to another, the long tail of small time users gets cut off. Ties are severed, people fall out of reach, etc. I initially joined a few sites that popped up after What, but since I didn't find any of the users there that I used to talk to regularly, I don't visit much ever anymore.

Not only that, it’s almost a certainty that not every little rarity alike to ‘bootleg of local ska band from the 80s that never released an album’ makes the jump each time.

Of course, those are mostly oddities that virtually no one cares about in a sonic sense, but it’s still a piece of musical history.

Kind of makes me wish whoever sued what.cd offered them a sort of clemency deal: keep the site up until everything has been archived by a legit third party (that wouldn’t share it, but so everything has at least been preserved), then shut it down.

Instead they burned down the musical library of Alexandria..

Woah Oink. I had forgotten what it was called, but I learned so much about digital quality and was exposed to so much new music that I still listen to today.

I miss OiNK all the time. So much music that wasn’t available anywhere else. Sigh.

The pink palace! I miss it.

And oink, waffles, Pedro's. It was the golden age of piracy.

Oink.

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