11 ms·

Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site

296 points by zuhayeer 11mo ago

MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
Previously: https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to-three-years-in-prison-3m-restitution-230317/ https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to...
- gethly 11mo ago
  > Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed. Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
  - jimmydorry 11mo ago
    > Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league. Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
    - gethly 11mo ago
      That is not what it says. They only said they had no bounty program to attract people to try and find bugs. That does not mean companies are not willing to compensate you if you find and report a bug in their system. I think 150k was well worth it, but the guy just worded it in the worst possible way.
    - joshmn 11mo ago
      The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount of money—exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges https://prison.josh.mn/charges There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
- GardenLetter27 11mo ago
  The US sentences seem really crazy coming from Europe - like even violent rapists barely get 3 years here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sexual-assault-case https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sex...
  - raincole 11mo ago
    I don't know the details about this specific case, but to me "violent rapists barely get 3 years" is the crazy side. YMMV.
    - viridian 11mo ago
      The US is a major outlier in sentencing for violent crimes and sex crimes. It's not the absolute peak in terms of sentencing, but its somewhere between the Latin American mean and the Middle Eastern mean, which is unexpected given its other human development indicators.
  - crtasm 11mo ago
    Your link does not back up your claim.
NooneAtAll3 11mo ago
> refund ah, it's this kind of pirate streaming
- MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
  The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
  - Semaphor 11mo ago
    Or you could use an adblocker.
    - MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
      A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
      - pferde 11mo ago
        Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads. Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
        MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
        At the time I'm quite certain I was using uBlock Origin pre-MV3. I don't think I also had my DNS-based adblocker yet, though.
      - Semaphor 11mo ago
        Maybe I’m not using enough of them, because I’ve never had issues with uBo. Or it’s because I use 3rd party script blocking.
rikafurude21 11mo ago
These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.
- JoeDohn 11mo ago
  it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
  - mlrtime 11mo ago
    Have an example of a search term for non us content, or are they all worldwide with 1000s of channels? I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      The goto options that are commonly recommended locally to me both have 40k+ channels, and if that doesn't include damn near every TV channel in existence that's still running, I'd be surprised. I'd imagine the IPTV pirates have no reason to limit the number of channels they can give you access too, since more = better, while trimming it down is just more work for the pirates, and getting access to every channel in the world is apparently not very difficult. I'd imagine the situation is much the same in other places.
- aleatorianator 11mo ago
  [dead]
- lurk2 11mo ago
pta2002 11mo ago
I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing. It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.
Pocomon 11mo ago
[dead]
b3lvedere 11mo ago
It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models' usually have a far better customer support than legal business models :)
- Telaneo 11mo ago
  The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels. I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
  - FinnKuhn 11mo ago
    Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
    - Telaneo 11mo ago
      Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant. But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
      - b3lvedere 11mo ago
        Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.
internet_points 11mo ago
His https://prison.josh.mn/self https://prison.josh.mn/self page was remarkably interesting and insightful. Some nuggets: > Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality, or privilege? > people want linear redemption stories, but real self-improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test. > There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.
- jacquesm 11mo ago
  > I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations. Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
  - RajT88 11mo ago
    If you want to take a broad view of the world, we may be entering into the post-age-of-enlightenment age where truth and ethics are malleable in service of the larger powers which build the things which comprise the world.
- joshmn 11mo ago
  Thanks for the sentiment. The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..." Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."
foofoo12 11mo ago
> Send fun emails Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an email if you haven't sent one in many months. Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They just have an "sign up for news updates". Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no clue what it is and ignore it. At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've launched!"
- joshmn 11mo ago
  This one was really important to me. Even the transactional emails were a bit fun to read. I kept them informal, as if I was talking to a friend of a friend. I certainly swore in them, too (at myself), when I was apologizing for things not working right. Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
- encom 11mo ago
  >Send fun emails. Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder): Winter is coming in Westeros and you must prepare by stocking up on food. Who knows if Drogon will fly by and burn your storage of snacks. Or the Night King will come to reign in the long winter. So prepare to receive a package from *REDACTED* with tracking ID: *REDACTED* You can keep an eye on the progress of your package with this tracking link *REDACTED*. People in the Seven Kingdoms still use carrier pigeons, so please note it could take up to a full workday for the link to become active. Autumn will end soon enough, be prepared! Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.
  - joshmn 11mo ago
    Oh, that's gross. Mine weren't that fun. They were more informal and usually self-deprecating (within good taste). The closest to that was the quarterly newsletter: I'd highlight the awful and frustrating bugs that nobody saw, and some of the funny emails I got.
shevy-java 11mo ago
I would not call it a "piracy" streaming site. I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information. Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay. People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.
- patanegra 11mo ago
  Pirating of course exists. You might rebrand it, but hardly as hero-, more like theft-. Theftbay would sound good to me.
  - cwillu 11mo ago
    Found the villain.
    - patanegra 11mo ago
      LOL. Does intellectual property exist, or not? If yes, then it can be stolen. If no, then it is fine to take any source code, any photo, any information, and do whatever I want with it, right?
  - lazyfanatic42 11mo ago
    Copying isn't theft.
    - prasadjoglekar 11mo ago
      Down the rabbit hole we go.
    - 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
relaxing 11mo ago
> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link. Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer. And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.
- VWWHFSfQ 11mo ago
  Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business. Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
- lifestyleguru 11mo ago
  Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.
  - joshmn 11mo ago
    I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user wasn't just schilling—if an unreasonable (see: 3) last comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask them to remove them. That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.
joshmn 11mo ago
Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062) though it didn't have much of the content that exists here. If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.
- _def 11mo ago
  You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
  - joshmn 11mo ago
    My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
    - chanux 11mo ago
      > not every vacancy is posted publicly Thanks for this insight, hopefully would help me. Also, love the bit "small, honest teams". Aligns really well with my biases.
    - _def 11mo ago
      Solid advice, thank you very much.
- twentyfiveoh1 11mo ago
  I was just just interested in how your "say no" lesson came from the streaming site. I am sure they asked you for all sorts of channels, but from their perspective, I kind of understand it. I had really wondered what kind of crazy of stuff you were shooting down. I didn't expect anyone to go too crazy on expecting feature requests on a pirate site.
miki123211 11mo ago
I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose. One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined. Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hydra-sites-as-an-emerging-piracy-problem/ https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs https://streamed.pk/docs
- joshmn 11mo ago
  This is relatively new and an interesting business model. There’s also “piracy as a service” https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy-as-a-service-paas-as-new-threat-vector/ https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy...
jaffa2 11mo ago
> My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was all me, no bullshit. I treated every message—even transactional emails—as an opportunity to build trust. What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way. Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
- joshmn 11mo ago
  It's a bit vague, I'll admit. Users in this space are typically plagued by poorly written emails, or emails that are still, "Hello," if any greeting at all; they also often come from noreplys and close you off from the operator. By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach users and to establish the human element.
  - jaffa2 11mo ago
    I suppose its a manifestation of the old adage the people do business with people. You are presenting as 'you', a human, an individual that will give the personal touch. Not some corporation that has 'departments' and acts as a faceless churn machine. Personally I'd rather have no emails of either type. Too many emails these days about everything. No I don't want to review X, or provide content for you (not you) for Y. I guess some people like it though.
Havoc 11mo ago
I'd absolutely hate being on the receiving end of some of these. e.g. >I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or getting roped into a referral scheme. I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good experience with but not like this
- joshmn 11mo ago
  I replied to another comment about further context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763 In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right—"how can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"—and that there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise active in the communities that they were posting in, and that it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
  - Havoc 11mo ago
    Yeah I think it's a valid business strategy that you're entitled to do and to be clear wasn't meaning to imply any sort of ethical concerns. Maybe this is a personal hangup my side but not a fan of paid services trying to extract additional value via other routes too - whether that's selling your data, taking up attention by bombarding me with marketing, cross-selling, showing me ads...or asking me to do guerilla marketing. The closer companies stick to "I give you money, you give me service" the better I judge them. Maybe I'm just jaded...
- stronglikedan 11mo ago
  > A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. Most people would just ignore it and move on if they didn't want to participate. Sweating the small stuff is no good for one's health. I personally don't dedicate any brain cells to a shit list. Sounds stressful.
maxglute 11mo ago
The UI of some piracy streaming sites are better than legit sites with much less hoops to jump through than torrents/Usenet or region locked legal services for rare stuff.
tryauuum 11mo ago
> noreply@ is absolutely stupid. the reason noreply addresses exist is to avoid endless autoreply loops caused by poorly programmed mail software
Projectiboga 11mo ago
How did you get your reading material? Was it the facility library, or just all ordered and mailed in?

296 points by zuhayeer 11mo ago

Previously: https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to-three-years-in-prison-3m-restitution-230317/ https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to...

gethly 11mo ago
> Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees, STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were ‘interested in the story,’ and stated that it would be bad if the vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed. Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty into extortion.
- jimmydorry 11mo ago
  > Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also informed there was no ‘bug bounty’ program at the baseball league. Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
  - gethly 11mo ago
    That is not what it says. They only said they had no bounty program to attract people to try and find bugs. That does not mean companies are not willing to compensate you if you find and report a bug in their system. I think 150k was well worth it, but the guy just worded it in the worst possible way.
  - joshmn 11mo ago
    The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount of money—exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges https://prison.josh.mn/charges There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported about the bug isn't how things played out—there's tons of context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the handling of situation. I realize it was the leading headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
GardenLetter27 11mo ago
The US sentences seem really crazy coming from Europe - like even violent rapists barely get 3 years here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sexual-assault-case https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sex...
- raincole 11mo ago
  I don't know the details about this specific case, but to me "violent rapists barely get 3 years" is the crazy side. YMMV.
  - viridian 11mo ago
    The US is a major outlier in sentencing for violent crimes and sex crimes. It's not the absolute peak in terms of sentencing, but its somewhere between the Latin American mean and the Middle Eastern mean, which is unexpected given its other human development indicators.
- crtasm 11mo ago
  Your link does not back up your claim.

NooneAtAll3 11mo ago

> refund ah, it's this kind of pirate streaming

MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free' ones use.
- Semaphor 11mo ago
  Or you could use an adblocker.
  - MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
    A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a combination of filter lists not being tested on them along with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
    - pferde 11mo ago
      Use a good adblocker. I'd never do anything illegal, of course, but a friend of my friend has been successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for years, and swears he barely sees any ads. Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are, the longer they stay around.
      - MallocVoidstar 11mo ago
        At the time I'm quite certain I was using uBlock Origin pre-MV3. I don't think I also had my DNS-based adblocker yet, though.
    - Semaphor 11mo ago
      Maybe I’m not using enough of them, because I’ve never had issues with uBo. Or it’s because I use 3rd party script blocking.

rikafurude21 11mo ago

These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The app gives you access to basically any channel in every country. They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider doing this.

JoeDohn 11mo ago
it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy a yearly account for 30$.
- mlrtime 11mo ago
  Have an example of a search term for non us content, or are they all worldwide with 1000s of channels? I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    The goto options that are commonly recommended locally to me both have 40k+ channels, and if that doesn't include damn near every TV channel in existence that's still running, I'd be surprised. I'd imagine the IPTV pirates have no reason to limit the number of channels they can give you access too, since more = better, while trimming it down is just more work for the pirates, and getting access to every channel in the world is apparently not very difficult. I'd imagine the situation is much the same in other places.
aleatorianator 11mo ago
[dead]
lurk2 11mo ago

pta2002 11mo ago

I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick) read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole thing. It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the state of modern streaming.

Pocomon 11mo ago

[dead]

b3lvedere 11mo ago

It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models' usually have a far better customer support than legal business models :)

Telaneo 11mo ago
The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-laurels. I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service rather than their selection of content they've held hostage. But as long as individual services can opt to not never share their content with anybody else, they can just hold their customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
- FinnKuhn 11mo ago
  Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market where each service offers pretty much the same products and they compete on price and product alone.
  - Telaneo 11mo ago
    Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly far out there to find them. Most everything is on every music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo after MP3 piracy became rampant. But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such. Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
    - b3lvedere 11mo ago
      Not that the music business has had some very shady business in the past, but my guess is that the movie industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if i'm not mistaken.

internet_points 11mo ago

His https://prison.josh.mn/self https://prison.josh.mn/self page was remarkably interesting and insightful. Some nuggets: > Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality, or privilege? > people want linear redemption stories, but real self-improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test. > There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.

jacquesm 11mo ago
> I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I think they're more like tests—constant ones—that you run against your own motivations. Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in trouble with the law than big corporations doing far worse stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good citizens'.
- RajT88 11mo ago
  If you want to take a broad view of the world, we may be entering into the post-age-of-enlightenment age where truth and ethics are malleable in service of the larger powers which build the things which comprise the world.
joshmn 11mo ago
Thanks for the sentiment. The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah also..." Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says and what actually happened."

foofoo12 11mo ago

> Send fun emails Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an email if you haven't sent one in many months. Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They just have an "sign up for news updates". Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no clue what it is and ignore it. At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've launched!"

joshmn 11mo ago
This one was really important to me. Even the transactional emails were a bit fun to read. I kept them informal, as if I was talking to a friend of a friend. I certainly swore in them, too (at myself), when I was apologizing for things not working right. Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good litmus test.
encom 11mo ago
>Send fun emails. Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a Soylent-style meal powder): Winter is coming in Westeros and you must prepare by stocking up on food. Who knows if Drogon will fly by and burn your storage of snacks. Or the Night King will come to reign in the long winter. So prepare to receive a package from *REDACTED* with tracking ID: *REDACTED* You can keep an eye on the progress of your package with this tracking link *REDACTED*. People in the Seven Kingdoms still use carrier pigeons, so please note it could take up to a full workday for the link to become active. Autumn will end soon enough, be prepared! Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.
- joshmn 11mo ago
  Oh, that's gross. Mine weren't that fun. They were more informal and usually self-deprecating (within good taste). The closest to that was the quarterly newsletter: I'd highlight the awful and frustrating bugs that nobody saw, and some of the funny emails I got.

shevy-java 11mo ago

I would not call it a "piracy" streaming site. I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are heroes for unrestricting information. Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it herobay. People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the law. Law should serve the people.

patanegra 11mo ago
Pirating of course exists. You might rebrand it, but hardly as hero-, more like theft-. Theftbay would sound good to me.
- cwillu 11mo ago
  Found the villain.
  - patanegra 11mo ago
    LOL. Does intellectual property exist, or not? If yes, then it can be stolen. If no, then it is fine to take any source code, any photo, any information, and do whatever I want with it, right?
- lazyfanatic42 11mo ago
  Copying isn't theft.
  - prasadjoglekar 11mo ago
    Down the rabbit hole we go.
  - 11mo ago

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relaxing 11mo ago

> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link. Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer. And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.

VWWHFSfQ 11mo ago
Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business. Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
lifestyleguru 11mo ago
Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.
- joshmn 11mo ago
  I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user wasn't just schilling—if an unreasonable (see: 3) last comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask them to remove them. That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.

joshmn 11mo ago

Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062) though it didn't have much of the content that exists here. If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little “startup lessons” page is as popular as the others) I’m be happy to answer them as long as they’re not too technical or related to my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl commands.

_def 11mo ago
You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start yourself, but I can't take much risk.
- joshmn 11mo ago
  My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I’m currently at, and I’m one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because founder still codes more than we’d like him to) was effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn’t have job postings up, and was the size that I’d fit into. I learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
  - chanux 11mo ago
    > not every vacancy is posted publicly Thanks for this insight, hopefully would help me. Also, love the bit "small, honest teams". Aligns really well with my biases.
  - _def 11mo ago
    Solid advice, thank you very much.
twentyfiveoh1 11mo ago
I was just just interested in how your "say no" lesson came from the streaming site. I am sure they asked you for all sorts of channels, but from their perspective, I kind of understand it. I had really wondered what kind of crazy of stuff you were shooting down. I didn't expect anyone to go too crazy on expecting feature requests on a pirate site.

miki123211 11mo ago

I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those aggregators expose. One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined. Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly). I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for bringing in traffic to those players. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hydra-sites-as-an-emerging-piracy-problem/ https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs https://streamed.pk/docs

joshmn 11mo ago
This is relatively new and an interesting business model. There’s also “piracy as a service” https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy-as-a-service-paas-as-new-threat-vector/ https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy...

jaffa2 11mo ago

> My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was all me, no bullshit. I treated every message—even transactional emails—as an opportunity to build trust. What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business buzzword bullshit type way. Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)

joshmn 11mo ago
It's a bit vague, I'll admit. Users in this space are typically plagued by poorly written emails, or emails that are still, "Hello," if any greeting at all; they also often come from noreplys and close you off from the operator. By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach users and to establish the human element.
- jaffa2 11mo ago
  I suppose its a manifestation of the old adage the people do business with people. You are presenting as 'you', a human, an individual that will give the personal touch. Not some corporation that has 'departments' and acts as a faceless churn machine. Personally I'd rather have no emails of either type. Too many emails these days about everything. No I don't want to review X, or provide content for you (not you) for Y. I guess some people like it though.

Havoc 11mo ago

I'd absolutely hate being on the receiving end of some of these. e.g. >I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or getting roped into a referral scheme. I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good experience with but not like this

joshmn 11mo ago
I replied to another comment about further context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763 In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right—"how can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"—and that there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise active in the communities that they were posting in, and that it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
- Havoc 11mo ago
  Yeah I think it's a valid business strategy that you're entitled to do and to be clear wasn't meaning to imply any sort of ethical concerns. Maybe this is a personal hangup my side but not a fan of paid services trying to extract additional value via other routes too - whether that's selling your data, taking up attention by bombarding me with marketing, cross-selling, showing me ads...or asking me to do guerilla marketing. The closer companies stick to "I give you money, you give me service" the better I judge them. Maybe I'm just jaded...
stronglikedan 11mo ago
> A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. Most people would just ignore it and move on if they didn't want to participate. Sweating the small stuff is no good for one's health. I personally don't dedicate any brain cells to a shit list. Sounds stressful.

maxglute 11mo ago

The UI of some piracy streaming sites are better than legit sites with much less hoops to jump through than torrents/Usenet or region locked legal services for rare stuff.

tryauuum 11mo ago

> noreply@ is absolutely stupid. the reason noreply addresses exist is to avoid endless autoreply loops caused by poorly programmed mail software

Projectiboga 11mo ago

How did you get your reading material? Was it the facility library, or just all ordered and mailed in?