Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostril | Hacker News Reader

The fact that copyright infringement works in spite of attempts to kill it seems to be proof that BitTorrent is well-designed, rather than evidence it's broken. What else would it be associated with? People do use it to distribute large datasets, but even those have fallen into the infringement category.

And of course; good faith is all that we have here.

View on HN

Whatever your feelings are about copyright infringement, the fact is that it killed Usenet, by making it intractable for independents to run full-feed Usenet servers (it was simply too expensive, and the work to keep up with the binaries drastically reduced the quality of service for the text posts). The result was a system that really only served copyright infringement, because those were the users anyone seriously investing in Usenet infrastructure were serving.

If people wanted to use Usenet for text then a service that didn’t offer binary groups should not have been a problem for people, right?

It seems rather that the value of the text groups was not high enough to get people to pay ~ anything as we scaled the internet and other text forums became widely available.

Text is ~ free. People typing at 180wpm only generate ~120bps of uncompressed text. A song is 2000x that, a video 10-100k x that. It seems like a model w paid barriers to entry to text forums is just not viable compared to free-to-the-user forums, or at least weren’t competitive when that ad-based model began.

I think it would be good for an open standard for text existed and was widely used, and didn’t rely on ads. But I don’t really see how logically one can blame the binaries for killing the text side of usenet. If people wanted to pay for text, they would have kept doing it. But as we’ve seen over the last 20 years, that business model has not generally worked.

It was a problem for everybody. You don't have to wonder about it: Usenet did consolidate down to a couple providers. People really did organize against providers that didn't carry binary feeds.

Ah, OK, you're one of those people.

So, to rephrase things: because of you, Usenet is dead. And BitTorrent is dead. And any future technology anything like it will be dead-on-arrival, because you simply don't grok how the world works.

And I'm very well aware that "the way the world works" is in direct conflict with "the way you think the world should be working", but that's the exact issue here.

You are Eternal September, personified. Good luck with that!

If you'd care to point out exactly what you mean, I might avoid those traits. But as it stands I have no idea what you're talking about, though I'm familiar with Eternal September.

My question was, how did you envision BitTorrent working?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com