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Comment by oguz-ismail | Hacker News Reader

> We recommend not using them

I've been using WeLib since April and had a good experience so far

If efforts like this are to be sustainable in any lasting way, participants need to be cooperative, not parasitic. I agree with the Anna's Archive team, it serves noone to have one of these players in the space hoarding their own collections and not sharing them to other archiving projects, it make the collection extremely vulnerable and at risk of becoming lost knowledge as time goes on.

I disagree with how this is framed. shadow libraries thrive on decentralization, any other servers mirroring a collection is better than no mirrors at all

Im not sure how you disagree with this. Decentralization relies on multiple copies in multiple places. The fact is that WeLib is not allowing other libraries like Anna's Archive to mirror or copy their exclusive collection, hence the recommendation not to use them.

Otherwise, please explain how I am missing your point.

No honour among thieves.

Let’s have the person who does not use any LLMs throw the first stone.

Will OpenAI get mad if I use text produced by ChatGPT? Will they say I stole it?

Then why does AA get mad that somebody else steals the material that AA stole in the first place?

> If efforts like this are to be sustainable in any lasting way, participants need to be cooperative, not parasitic. I agree with the Anna's Archive team,

That's an odd combination.

>If efforts like this are to be sustainable in any lasting way, participants need to be cooperative, not parasitic

that is an odd demand for a site that thrives on piracy. Don't steal from the thieves? When you take from others it's liberation, when others take from you it's parasitic, that's certainly a convenient coincidence

They steal it, but give everyone free access. You can download it for free, but can also torrent everything. They don't hoard for themselves, but everyone gets access to what they have. That is the crucial difference.

Only giving access to your material over downloads means that people have to pay if they want to get more of it. If those people don't share it then the material is going to be lost again.

Torrenting all the material slapping using their frontend as a base and just making money is different.

They're not saying that the experience of using them will be bad; they're saying that participants in the ecosystem who are not cooperative are a net negative on the future of the movement. As a user, you may not see that directly, but only over time if resources are taken away from the cooperative parties.

Why use them over annas archive?

cleaner interface

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