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Comment by chuckadams | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: the simple reason Gnutella declined is that it was replaced by Bittorrent.

Gnutella's original sin was that it combined distributed search with distributed download. In a rational world, that would be smart and good but in a litigious world, that was too sophisticated for the Supreme Court and they ruled it as infringing on copyright through inducement of the user. Gnutella clients, like other P2P clients with search, got sued out of existence.

Bittorrent offloaded the distributed search onto websites which routinely got sued or shutdown. Funnily enough, one of my big improvements to Gnutella in the first year of LimeWire was to drive out the website users because they were overwhelming the network upload capabilities without adding to them. That improved the 90% download failures in 2001 but interesting to wonder what if we had gone another way.

I don't think it has much to do with legality.

For me the biggest problem is authenticity. On most of the decentralized P2P networks of that time is that you never know what you are getting. Look for some Disney movie, get porn. Very common back in the days. Of course you also had all the malware, scams, etc... More generally, it didn't do much to incentive good behavior (sharing).

Bittorrent, with its private trackers had some accountability, ratios, etc... The protocol itself favors peers that give the most in return.

i remember downloading an mp3 of a songs that claimed to be collab between hendrix and jim morrison.

just found it on youtube now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSRLf30lj0M), and i'm excited to see another commenter was there for the same reason!

LimeWire was huge .. 100s of millions of downloads in those days. It only went away because it was sued out of existence. Plus, by the end, it supported torrents as well.

edonkey:

Fear and loathing in Las Vagas (took a week to download) = Granny porn. Sigh

Sure, but the attached chat rooms were pretty handy, I used to like to download bootlegged concerts back in the day, to find new ones you've never heard of.

Plus, always fun to get laughed for mistyping The Almond Brothers Band at 3am...

I don’t think that’s a hot take, BitTorrent learned from Gnutella and made a better protocol. Gnutella is important historically, but it had a lot of downsides as a protocol that BitTorrent improved on.

Gnutella developers created huge innovations and would have continued to do so if not sued out of existence. We solved scalability and had good download mesh + DHT solutions for sourcing. I'm sure we would have been at least as good as torrents (which we supported) if we had continued.

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