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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

It's the same with things like game trainers, save editors, etc.. Sign up and give your e-mail address to this forum so that you can see the download link for this file. Which is an outdated version. The new version is in another forum thread on a separate forum, but you have to register to see links. The link is to a rapidshare download page, which rest assured is totally legit.

I honestly don't understand why more people don't create Github accounts and use that to distribute, or at least use their ISP's free web space. Most of these tools have names, are well-known, and are the top hit on Google, but none of them have an actual website that you can go to to see if they've released new versions, something for other games, etc.

It's all very sketch.

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Trainers, save editors, translations are basically a common entry point into programming, like a closed knit group of people that love video games and who wants to modify/hack/translate their favourites games. At some point, programming comes to the table and people will start sharing knowledge about it with their own way of doing things. A popular project will get hosted somewhere and the following projects will get hosted there too, simply because they're learning by looking at the popular one. Rapidshare, megauploads, all of these are tools people know before getting into programming, so they just use it. Github is something that comes later, if things get serious.

Dwarf fortress stuff is like that, Minecraft is even worse, you get adfly in the middle :D

>Dwarf fortress stuff is like that

dffd exists for things that aren't github(etc)-appropriate such as tools. No real reason to use anything else unless you're trying to monetise it with adf.ly etc (which might also count as a reason not to download).

> It's all very sketch.

To me it seems very simple: level of effort. Uploading your hack/mod/whatever to rapidshare takes about one minute, or less. On the other hand, if you want to learn about git and github, you have to spend plenty of time on that.

Not true. You can make a nearly empty github repository with a few clicks and start adding releases to it.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted but you're absolutely right. You can create a new repo, click on "releases", click on "draft new release". Type in the description in markdown (easier than HTML) and upload a binary attachment, hit publish.

Zero knowledge of git was necessary. Oh and also if you want to edit that README.md? You can do it from inside Github too, still zero need to know git.

Come on... ask any one out of the IT world and they all prefer not using GitHub... your vision is way to oriented from a developer perspective.

You /can/, but it's not a use case that github pushes or that people who don't know github would think of. With rapidshare et al you go to the site and it has a big obvious "upload and share a file" button right on the front page.

So? It's possible, and people can make use of it. They may not know, but this can be remedied by communicating. It's also quite a lot better than using some one-off file host such as rapidshare. See Ixiaus' post for more information.

Defaults are important, and what's optimized for one use case isn't optimized for another. An opinionated site that just provides the simplest possible interface for uploading and downloading files is a valuable thing.

(Plus I suspect that if a lot of people started hosting multi-megabyte binaries on github, their policies would change pretty quickly)

There are already many, many mulit-mega binaries hosted on github. It is what the releases feature is for.

But yes, the most simplest site is the best for the most simplest people. However we're talking about people who spent a lot of time into creating their mod/whatever here. They can spend a minute or two more to figure out distribution.

I honestly don't understand why more people don't create Github accounts and use that to distribute, or at least use their ISP's free web space.

The (pseudo)anonymous aspect of not having a fixed identity which could easily be linked to something else is both convenient and valuable to privacy?

Github is very handy for someone creating a portfolio and showing off a history of their programming skills. But you could get the pseudo-anonimity with a separate Github account. It's just not worth the effort, the public of these hacks doesn't demand it.

Even better, anybody wanting to distribute something using free services should upload to multiple services (github included). Redundancy is a good thing.

They get a commission if you sign up for rapidshare to get that fast lane download. Basically MLM.

There's a huge amount of "pirated" software/porn shared on many of those platforms for that reason.

What makes random binaries uploaded to GitHub releases more trusthworthy? You still only have a random online identity linked to it. All trust still comes from the context of the announcement posts.

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