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It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clingi
by sbdaman 3y ago
It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.
- best_one_there 3y agoBasically all of an actual software company is bullshit jobs unrelated to the core product like legal, marketing, investor relations, HR, maybe even developers for R&D etc. Running a website doesn't require that many people. I've worked at companies with 4 developers and 30+ "other stuff". The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them, but the actual product would work just fine if we wanted it to.
- jahewson 3y agoAnecdotally, I’ve never met anyone who thought this way who’s product didn’t suck.
- best_one_there 3y agoIt's not an opinion. Legal is very useful in the general case, but if you're an anonymous torrent site operator who fully intends to ignore the law anyway it's a waste of time.
- George83728 3y agoStack Overflow seems to still be running well.
- ebiester 3y agoI don't understand this. If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth. Growth may be making the product better, creating new product lines, or improving the scalability - for example, allowing larger numbers of users or entries. However, you can make the choice to make a well constrained product that serves a valuable use but doesn't need growth. Consider Bingo Card Creator, for example.
- lamontcg 3y ago> If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth. After 10+ years you always see the operational demand increase because of all the necessary edge conditions you build up (backcompat and whatever else).
- ebiester 3y agoDoes the cost of change increase, or the cost of maintenance, or the cost of keeping it on? Yes, the cost of change by definition increases with the complexity. I don't think that is in contention. Why is it changing for any other reason that you're growing (or trying to stave off decline?) For internal tools, change may be a function of external business pressures (like a supplier going out of business, requiring changes in an internal tool), but that is asking for new software. As you add libraries, the cost of maintenance increases because the surface area of security increases. However, short of major changes (React, Rails, Etc), this feels like it's not moving outside the 10-20% range. Then, there's the cost of keeping it on.
- fknorangesite 3y ago> The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them Seems their jobs aren't bullshit, then, are they?
- best_one_there 3y agoFor a real company, sure!
- hirako2000 3y agoReferring to the developers, not the bullshit workers running around them.
- raincole 3y ago> bullshit jobs unrelated to the core product like legal, marketing, investor relations, HR, maybe even developers for R&D etc. Wow. You think legal, marketing, investor relations are all bullshit jobs...? Just wow.
- vdnkh 3y agoPeak HN moment
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Zanneth 3y agoTry working at a big company for a little while.
- kuschku 3y agoIf you're running a community funded website, you don't need any of this overhead. In the 90's, pretty much the entire internet ran without these jobs. Sure, they're necessary if you have an actual company, but the point is that you can run a website without a company.
- best_one_there 3y agoIf you're not an official company with a legal presence, yes. A lot of seriously dense replies to my comment, seemingly wilfully misunderstanding. _Obviously_ the legal department at an actual company is not bullshit.
- budoso 3y agoLove that you excluded HR
- m00dy 3y agoNo one needs HR.
- afterburner 3y ago
- costco 3y agoKickAssTorrents made millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. I doubt their decision to start Rarbg was charitable or even ideologically driven. They probably just want out now. Lower margins may have been a part of that.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoCan be both. Even Marx participated in the stock market
- pxc 3y agoOf course he did! Marx was an economist, living within and studying capitalism. He wasn't some ascetic monk.
- miroljub 3y agoMarx always preached that the way to go is for the working class to become owners of the means of production. The only logical way to achieve exactly this is to participate in the stock market and own company shares. I still don't understand how the communists managed to convince people that Marx saw things exactly in the opposite way. Even now, you hear left leaning parties telling that "stocks are evil, one can lose complete retirements on the stock market" and in the same time "rich are rich because they earned everything in the stock market".
- mordae 3y ago> "stocks are evil, one can lose complete retirements on the stock market" Putting retirement money into "balanced portfolio" of stocks also destroys competition and pits corporations against their employees in a fight to get them more money after they retire minus the profits of the bookkeepers or how are those managers called. > "rich are rich because they earned everything in the stock market" Insider trading. :] And also just buying index funds, with the save issue as above.
- princevegeta89 3y agoIt's quite unbelievable that the reason was they could not meet the costs of running it, while not being able to collect donations or help raise funds to keep the lights on. Technically the ownership and administration of their servers could have been distributed all across the world, which would have helped with the staff availability to a good extent.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoThey are mostly serving text that can be cached and have a search function. Is it really surprising that a few people can run one?
- mistercheph 3y agosee: google.com
- CyberDildonics 3y agoAre you trying to say that 110k page views per day is the same as google executing 8.5 billion searches of the entire internet per day?
- oxygen_crisis 3y ago[dead]
- sbdaman 3y ago>Is it really surprising that a few people can run one? No, and I didn't say that.
- CyberDildonics 3y agoWhat did you mean then?
- sbdaman 3y agoI'm not surprised that a haphazardly organized group of people /can/ run a site like rarbg. It's just interesting how volatile (this isn't the right word but I'm not sure what is) the operations of these sites tend to be in light of the fact that the sites hold a lot of cultural value. RARBG was incredibly popular and was an important resource for torrenting. It's rare to see sites of that size and importance run in that way these days.
- narag 3y ago
- abwizz 3y agoa taste of the original internet
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- q1w2 3y agoWhile we like to romanticize these groups, they often have ulterior motives in getting users to the site. Pushing ads from less-than-reputable ad-sources, and having a section with binaries where admins can push malware laden programs/games/files to increase the size of a client's botnet. The model is that as users become more comfortable on the site, they eventually browse to the more dangerous categories and download programs/games/cracks/etc... I wrote a blog post about a deep dive I did on one site, and showed that the admins were seeding malware in program downloads. Suffice to say, when I reported the admins, other admins banned my account on the site and IP blocked me. I actually ended up taking the blog post down because they started attacking my domain, and even Google blacklisted my domain because I had snippets of the malware code posted (I guess I should have used images instead of code). I was younger and just tinkering with security research anyway.
- narag 3y agoI wrote a blog post about a deep dive I did on one site... But it wasn't this site, was it? The most salient feature of Rarbg was that they verified uploads.
- logical_person 3y agosorry but this is nonsensical, one site pushed malware so they all do? typical "security" person
- creatonez 3y agoI don't think RARBG ever had ads, and they always filtered out anything malicious or low quality. Your description applies generally, but is the complete opposite of what RARBG was.