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RapidShare is Shutting down

rapidshare.com

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Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#131

Post by acveilleux »

danudey wrote: post #46
stusmall wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. This is something that has always sketched me out about the Android rooting and moding scene. "Download this suspect binary from rapid share and run it as…

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 Which is an outdated version.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…

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.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#132

Post by tokenizerrr »

lmm wrote: post #130
tokenizerrr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#133

Post by RankingMember »

pje wrote: post #80

goodnight sweet prince/and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

Many memories of waiting for their little countdown timer to finish so I could click the "Free download" link, switching to another tab during the countdown, and then forgetting to come back in time before the download link became stale and having to do it all over again.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#134

Post by undefined0 »

sandworm wrote: post #67

Rapidshare died because the market moved on. "File hosting services" like rapidshare have been replaced by cutthroat "cyberlockers" like Keep2share and rapidgator. The most successful cyberlockers do what Rapidshare decided not to: pay uploaders, even those who share illegally. And also pay linking sites through referral schemes far more resilient legally. They aren't trying to appease anyone not either a customer or…

I partly disagree with this. It's true that there is a crowd of uploaders who do it for profit, but Putlocker/Firedrive discontinued their affiliate system in 2012 and continued to be one of the most popular file hosts (yes, they closed down now but that's because they operated in the uk and had issues). Zippyshare also remains very popular when it doesn't pay uploaders either. Vkontakte is another popular file sharing site in addition to 4shared (but 4shared recently started being very strict to copyrighted files).

Argubly one could argue that megaupload was mainly used by non-profit uploaders. It gained popularity with affiliates but afterwards the average person and non-profit uploaders used the website to upload files more than the affiliate users. I believe you had to become a premium member to actually gain access to the rewards feature.

Rapidshare died because not only did they combat copyrighted files, they also blocked the ability to share legit files. As pointed out in the comments elsewhere in this thread, they tried to out-Dropbox Dropbox.

edit: also, Mediafire before they went all-cloud had no affiliate system and is very popular. And look at Mega.co.nz, a very popular website which is used for movies etc.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#135

Post by detaro »

danudey wrote: post #46
stusmall wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. This is something that has always sketched me out about the Android rooting and moding scene. "Download this suspect binary from rapid share and run it as…

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…

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.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#136

Post by rakoo »

chii wrote: post #108
rakoo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd expect a team like xda-developers to run a seed of their content; it's the best way to make sure it is still available.

the point is that a service like rapidshare doesn't cost the user any money (and instead, get ads). Running a torrent server is expensive, and require dedicated hardware too. You can't really seed from the webhost after all.

The user can use seedboxes, they're far from being as difficult to use as dedicated hardware. They sometimes have some free tier that I expect would be more than enough for a team like xda-developers (think 5GB). It's true that they wouldn't be able to earn money through this, though.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#137

Post by lmm »

tokenizerrr wrote: post #132
lmm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#138

Post by lmm »

wmf wrote: post #97
ratsmack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered if Freenet, or a similar encrypted network file system would be a viable solution. This, of course, requires a significant number of computers to contribute full time.

AFAIK Freenet is basically a cache with no incentive system, so content will expire. There are some cryptocurrency-oriented storage projects but they all seem to be in way over their heads.

I think the fundamental economics for a cryptocurrency approach don't lean towards preserving obscure things that don't interest many people. Storage cost is always going to be proportional to the amount of data being stored, but income is always going to be proportional to the number of people who want the data.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#139

Post by Shorel »

DigitalSea wrote: post #73

Is anyone else here surprised that Rapidshare is still even a thing and lasted this long in the face of Mediashare, Megaupload, Zippyshare and all those other sites? I haven't seen a Rapidshare link shared in a very long time. I remember once upon a time if you downloaded leaked music or even software, then Rapidshare was the go to site for that kind of thing. Funny how things change.

For me the service to use was eDonkey/eMule. You could find anything there.

Nowadays it's mostly torrents.

Re: RapidShare is Shutting down

#140

Post by toomuchtodo »

saganus wrote: post #13
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish the Internet Archive had an embargo feature, where you could push data in and while it wouldn't be served, it would be stored until a later date when copyright issues could be worked out.

This is an interesting idea. It would work kind of like an escrow, right? Where the "release/publish clause" could be tied to copyright expiration or other legal events like you say. The problem I see is, how do you filter/reject the amount of stuff you would have to store without even being public? AFAIK, the IA has issues storing so much of the already-public data, so storing "dark" (non-public/unpublished) stuff w…

> Does anyone know if anything resembles this? I mean, I could very well leave a low-powered NAS to help the IA serve their content, store it for later use, etc. And I imagine (hope) that a lot of other people would too. It would be a way of donating electricity, space to a worthy cause.

The Internet Archive serves torrent files for every object they store, so in theory, anyone could have a NAS that would crawl those torrent files and then join the swarm/seed for all of those objects.

That would be a hell of an open source project. The Internet Archive would then be a metadata repository and seeder of last resort. #shutUpAndTakeMyMoney

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