This is missing an important part of the story. In the early 2000s slashdot.org was similar to what HN is now, with HN having more of a startup vibe and Slashd

This is missing an important part of the story. In the early 2000s slashdot.org was similar to what HN is now, with HN having more of a startup vibe and Slashdot having more Linux news. But a very similar audience, checked every day by them. BitTorrent needed a very large scale test. They also needed a group of people technical enough to format BitTorrent and test it, and content he could license (ie that wasn’t pirated) to test it that would appeal to them. So a post appeared on Slashdot: “Free porn”. BitTorrent licensed some very high resolution (way higher than most online video at the time) lesbian porn from lightspeed. All people had to do was install this tool called BitTorrent to get it.