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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Is there a particular reason why you chose not to pass the torch? Too few users at this point? Most of the torrents having no seeders?

In any case, your story reminds me of the good ol' days of the web. Back in high school, being able to just put up a cool site and have people magically find it through Google felt like god mode. I never ran anything big like your torrent site (which I'm pretty sure I've visited), but I imagine you got a lot of satisfaction out of having thousands of users.

I miss the days when the web was this simple. Now I constantly question the time investment of creating a website because the (im)material condition has changed so much; the search algorithm is completely different and so many people use a small handful of platforms. Unless you generate eye candy and it goes viral, or it competes with major internet companies, I'm under the impression that you can just forget it.

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Good question. I don't have any idea who I would pass it to. If you do, it could be considered!

I also miss the good old days. It all felt smaller looking back, but still huge back then in a lot of ways.

Being found on Google and starting a community off that alone does seem like a pipe dream now, but I think mostly because of how people interact with the web and the platforms they are siloed into by default.

what was the monthly running cost? and how much did you earn from ads? (i am guessing it was not that much because it doesn't sound like loosing adsense caused a lot of pain)

The VPS was like $60 a year. At the end it was like $100 a year from ads.

At one point in the early 2010's there were a few $1,000 months when there was a car model released with torrent in the name!

LOL I can only imagine how many people discovered the world of underground file sharing because they were interested in a Pontiac.

damn, it must have been frustrating to realize that this rise in income was a fluke and wouldn't happen again.

> At one point in the early 2010's there were a few $1,000 months when there was a car model released with torrent in the name!

"You wouldn't download a car!"

Have you seen an uptick after the game Elden Ring came out in February 2022? You ride a goat-horse hybrid named Torrent.

I run a small forum for Range Rover enthusiasts, which does occasionally surface on Google but mostly seems to spread by word-of-mouth. That approach is handy if you can reach potential community members via "conventional" mass social media, but want a quiet wee corner to chat in without being marketed at.

I'm interested! I wish I knew about your site before it went down. I run a seedbox, and I've been on the hunt for popular-but-legal torrents to support. I'd be more than happy to take a swing at running your site, if only to be a user myself.

Feel free to reach out if you're genuinely interested in passing on the torch:

torrents@cosmo.red

the internet archive have torrents of all their media, although very many of them aren't seeded

I've tried helping keeping and seeding some historical archives, but it gets tedious quickly downloading one by one (and there's not much activity in them anyway). It would be nice if there was a more organized way of helping archival! (like downloading a large chunk of their database and seeding it automatically)

On one of my high seas sites there is an archive team which uses the API to find "at risk" torrents (<3 seeds). People dedicate X TB and have a script that hits the API, finds some at risk torrents then grabs them to seed and repeats till it fills the space alotted to archiving purposes.

Seems like something the IA could implement with some help.

How do they distinguish those at risk because just unpopular from those at risk because better versions exist ?

They only archive original sources, not transcodes. With that said I'd guess they'd start archiving non sources if there was space.

This helps somewhat, but there might be many original sources of the same thing, more or less depending on what we are talking about ?

Without doxxing myself or the site it's video so they prioritise by format. So it would go something like.

UHDBD > UHDRemux UHDWebRip > HDBD > HDRemux > HDWebRip > DVD9 > DVD5

With multiple sources within each tier treated equally.

The general thought process is more about the site disappearing so the focus on sources makes more sense and transcodes can be created trivially if needed for a theoretical new site as needed.

With the IA this is unlikely to be an issue as they'd just want to make sure each torrent has seeds so no real need for prioritization around sources.

it is possible to resurect a dead torrent, you need, a copy of the original file[s] in the torrent, and duplication of the original directory path.

are there archives to go to for dead torrents? any places that seeds dead torrents on demand?

I am interested in helping (and seeing that treasure), please contact me too: spry.sock7211@fastmail.com

Please consider that choice. It's bad for everybody if they can de-facto ban the protocol through progressive stigmatisation.

Just don't do it. It's like taking a child from you. Someone else starts to bastardize it, use it in way you don't like etc. And you can't do anything about it, since it's not your thing anymore. I've made this mistake once and it's not a good feeling. Better bury it.

Good thoughts.

Have you considered making it into a software package?

You could take any custom code you wrote (like the layout of the pages) and make a guide on how to remake your site from scratch (what software packages you ran, OS, things like that) and post that to github as open source.

That would allow you to keep your baby but then let your electric grandchildren float off into the internet to see where they might sprout.

Interesting thoughts, will have to think about that.

As a counter-point, you built this thing in part to give the world something good and uplifting. If you kill the child, you guarantee the outcome of failure. Sure there's a chance that the person you pass it to goes in a direction you don't like, but there's also a chance it goes on to magnify it's mission. It's such a neat project and something I wish I'd discovered before today (sadlol).

Hell, maybe I'll take it over if you're willing. I'd keep you access to it and grant veto power over any changes you don't like. What's the current stack? LAMP or something else?

Another thing is if you decide to bury it, do not burn any bridges. A few years later you might want to restart it. So make notes, keep everything archived.

Let your pride go and free it.

I think 'let things die so you don't have to feel the pain of how other people might change them' is a pretty negative outlook on things

I mean, if it were some super unique thing, then sure I think there might be a some reason to suggest he should open it up.

But nothing about the site is actually technically unique beyond the brand and its history. It means a LOT to OP sentimentally, but if this was doing some kind of amazing social good, someone could just go make a rails app for their CS degree's senior design class and we'd have a functional replacement back.

So, I think OP's decision to bury it makes a lot of sense. It's a very human decision and it doesn't really hurt anyone by him making it, and if you want to be super utilitarian about it, it's probably better to let them peacefully close this chapter and move on to whatever next interesting thing they're going to do rather than sour them on it and have them do their next thing more privately.

I’ve felt this way for a considerable time too. In retrospect, it has now been ten years and yet still nothing has really changed, which I am kinda glad.

If not passing on the torch, would you consider releasing a data set for the ~5500 torrents? I imagine it wouldn't be a huge data set, and it would allow others to build their own websites and continue the work.

I wouldn’t mind the code itself to crib off of. Although the idea of continuing the site as a whole sounds really attractive if the domain name is included.

Can you send me the dump so I can host it somewhere?

The author opens up the article saying it was a null routed server issue and he didn't have time or resources to fix it. Maybe that's a new edit from after you read it.

How does a null routed server break you site/server though? It seems it’s one “undo that!” Support request away from being revived?

> I miss the days when the web was this simple

You mean before AdSense and SEO or exactly what the site’s author does for living?

Ya, I am a part of the "problem" so to speak, though I do my best to create content that not only ranks well in a search engine, but is genuinely helpful for the reader.

I suppose it was inevitable in the drive of the commercialization of everything in life?

Just my two cents, but IMHO SEO for useful information is itself a great good. The evil are the people who have low-value content and eclipse the higher value content through gaming.

There isn’t a such thing as “SEO for great content”. The search algorithms don’t reward “great content”. The only way you win is by not playing the game. You have to find other ways to market and have an “unfair advantage”.

How many times have you seen “useful content” buried by paragraphs of word salad to juice SEO?

I'm not sure I understand your argument. "SEO for great content" to me just means you have great content, and you Optimize it for Search Engines so people can fine it easier/higher.

I’m saying simply that what the algorithm cares about and what causes it to rank high is completely orthogonal to “good content”.

Search for any subject where you consider yourself a subject matter expert. Are the top results what you would consider good? This is excluding first party vendor content.

Don't beat yourself up if you were doing SEO the proper way, making content that genuinely appealed to the proper audience, and/or made the content more accessible. I think there are enough people here on HN that understand proper SEO versus trying to game the system.

Well, clearly not before AdSense or SEO.

By simple, I meant in the sense that some kid in high school could put up a site that's not rich in JavaScript, have people find it organically, not need to worry so much about scaling or DDOS, not need to worry about GDPR, not have the expectation of accessibility, and not need to have an iOS and Android app for people to actually use it.

This isn't to say that the same technology used in say 2005 can't be used today. But it's a time investment with not nearly as much of a likelihood of seeing a meaningful return.

GDPR wouldn't apply unless you have business in Europe

How much has the EU enforced it against small overseas businesses?

Much more relevantly, there laws are much more lax if you aren't a business.

Back when I was in high school, you had to submit your website to Yahoo, and choose which "neighborhood" it belonged in.

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