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> Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. There's some irony to this appearing on what.cd When OiNK was taken down there w

> Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. There's some irony to this appearing on what.cd When OiNK was taken down there was a massive community effort to put a successor online within days. But we had to kick out an early staff member called "WhatMan" for trying to hijack the entire project and run it as his own kingdom, right down to changing the name from "Waffles" to "What CD?" while others were catching a few hours sleep between hacking at the code. Months of bitter disputes between the sites followed.

gonehome 4y ago
Did Waffles.fm come out of that? I didn't know they had some sort of shared history after the fall of oink.
- barneygale 4y ago
  Very briefly, yes. OiNK went down on Oct 23 2007, and Waffles launched on Oct 31. What followed within a day or two. The split probably happened around the 27th.
pluc 4y ago
I remember that split. Felt like Pearl Jam and Nirvana; two great things that existed at once but largely ignored each other apart from the occasional jab when you would ask them about the other. What.cd had Trent Reznor so Waffles can suck it
- barneygale 4y ago
  Waffles also had Trent Reznor - he uploaded his albums to both sites. I deleted his first upload of Ghosts I–IV because he messed up the ID3 tags ;)
pa7ch 4y ago
I would love to hear more of the history of those sites. I discovered Oink by being invited by a friend in highschool and then rode on waffles.fm until it was shut down too. I have so many good memories of those sites and I learned to develop better writing skills participating on those forums. It was one of the few places on the internet I ever felt active in.
- barneygale 4y ago
  The Waffles forums were something truly special. I'm so pleased you were there :-)
- gunsch 4y ago
  I happened to join Oink just before it fell over, and when it went down I managed to find some of the former members on a forum saying "hey, let's go build a replacement right away." I was only a budding PHP developer in high school, but managed to jump in with the right folks at the right time and learned a lot working on that site. Couple stories from memory: * What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back". * I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know * Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community. * I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since. * Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?

gonehome 4y ago

Did Waffles.fm come out of that? I didn't know they had some sort of shared history after the fall of oink.

barneygale 4y ago
Very briefly, yes. OiNK went down on Oct 23 2007, and Waffles launched on Oct 31. What followed within a day or two. The split probably happened around the 27th.

pluc 4y ago

I remember that split. Felt like Pearl Jam and Nirvana; two great things that existed at once but largely ignored each other apart from the occasional jab when you would ask them about the other. What.cd had Trent Reznor so Waffles can suck it

barneygale 4y ago
Waffles also had Trent Reznor - he uploaded his albums to both sites. I deleted his first upload of Ghosts I–IV because he messed up the ID3 tags ;)

pa7ch 4y ago

I would love to hear more of the history of those sites. I discovered Oink by being invited by a friend in highschool and then rode on waffles.fm until it was shut down too. I have so many good memories of those sites and I learned to develop better writing skills participating on those forums. It was one of the few places on the internet I ever felt active in.

barneygale 4y ago
The Waffles forums were something truly special. I'm so pleased you were there :-)
gunsch 4y ago
I happened to join Oink just before it fell over, and when it went down I managed to find some of the former members on a forum saying "hey, let's go build a replacement right away." I was only a budding PHP developer in high school, but managed to jump in with the right folks at the right time and learned a lot working on that site. Couple stories from memory: * What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back". * I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know * Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community. * I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since. * Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?