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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

>You'd have to be delusional, or in torrentfreak's case pandering for ad impressions, to pretend anyone would bother putting their friends, family and colleagues through all those hoops when they have email, skype, msn, dropbox, yahoo, free hosting, $1 hosting, $2 hosting, $3 hosting, $4 hosting and so many other, easier options available for non-pirated content.

I suppose you'd have to be similarly delusional to use Windows Media Player or QuickTime when VLC is out there?

People use poor but popular products all the time. It doesn't make them liars or crooks.

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Windows Media Player and Quicktime might be lame but they don't actively work against the user unless you pony up some cash to use the "can open a file in just 2 clicks" version.

Sending your friends/family/colleagues a link on MegaUpload (or similar) was essentially putting a paywall between them and the file you actually wanted to give them. For pirated content it makes sense, you have no concern for who comes along to download it and of course they gave you a cut of the money too: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/review/paid-to-upload-upload...

For <legitimate work> it's just nonsense when there's so many high profile, easier ways to get that file from a to b.

How do you explain people using the trial version of winzip then?

I have in fact received large client-owned files over megaupload and rapidshare (they emailed me the URL). I don't really know why they didn't stage them on their own server (that's how we do it) but when trying to work smoothly with non-nerd biz dev people I'm certainly not going to push back over doing something else for one minute every couple of weeks.

"Sending your friends/family/colleagues a link on MegaUpload (or similar) was essentially putting a paywall between them and the file you actually wanted to give them."

However, if you want to transfer a large file to someone, and are not technically savvy enough to have Dropbox, FTP, or some other hosting, you'd probably Google how to send a file, and services such as MegaUpload and Yousendit would be the top results.

The services are biassed to make things as easy as possible for the uploader (free, no sign up required, just enter recipient's email address, redirect to subscribe page after), who is unlikely to take into account the things done to make things a little harder for the downloader (delayed download, premium paywall, throttled free service). For clients who have neither the budget nor the wits to pay for the premium service or their own hosting, the free service worked fine for occasional use.

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