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Sounds like a warez share - there's a curation group, and a large ftp server (with lots of people having upload credentials) You give people a credit for uploa

Sounds like a warez share - there's a curation group, and a large ftp server (with lots of people having upload credentials) You give people a credit for uploading something (anything recent, has to not exist currently on the share), in order to get access to download anything from the ftp. People want to get free stuff, so they contribute some small thing - like an antivirus update that you can download for free from the vendor websites, in exchange you get that camm'ed version of The Martian or whatever you were looking for. The drive folks make a copy once a week from the main repository, and duplicates it onto portable hard drives. It doesn't mean one person or even one group of people are doing the uploading and curation, just that one group is copying it down and distributing it (even then it might be a lot of different people doing each individual step). Old school warez clubs function pretty much like I described. The better clubs enforce some kind of ratio - like for every meg you download, you need to contribute 500k (for 1:2) or 1 meg (for 1:1 ratio) - that really gets good stuff onto the sharing sites and people compete for uploading the best videos/movies/music/warez/games, etc - for community recognition.

jlgaddis 10y ago
Granted, I've been out of the "warez scene" for going on 20 years but the "better clubs" didn't have ratios. For the "public" or your average person that was turned on to a site by their buddy or something, yeah. But once you were really "in", you didn't have to do anything. You just took what you wanted -- even better if you can turn around and upload it elsewhere. I started out running BBS systems but, like everyone, eventually moved to the Internet where I ran several "semi-private" dedicated servers with lots of storage on "fast" (at the time) connections. Most of them were fully open to those in certain groups but there were a couple that were pretty easy to get an account on, albeit with a ratio requirement. A lot of those accounts tended to get banned pretty quickly, however, as the users would upload miscellaneous crap just so that they could download and nobody wanted to really "monitor" or "evaluate" the stuff in /incoming from the new users. Thanks for taking me back to my younger days. :)

jlgaddis 10y ago

Granted, I've been out of the "warez scene" for going on 20 years but the "better clubs" didn't have ratios. For the "public" or your average person that was turned on to a site by their buddy or something, yeah. But once you were really "in", you didn't have to do anything. You just took what you wanted -- even better if you can turn around and upload it elsewhere. I started out running BBS systems but, like everyone, eventually moved to the Internet where I ran several "semi-private" dedicated servers with lots of storage on "fast" (at the time) connections. Most of them were fully open to those in certain groups but there were a couple that were pretty easy to get an account on, albeit with a ratio requirement. A lot of those accounts tended to get banned pretty quickly, however, as the users would upload miscellaneous crap just so that they could download and nobody wanted to really "monitor" or "evaluate" the stuff in /incoming from the new users. Thanks for taking me back to my younger days. :)