9 ms·

RapidShare is Shutting down

388 points by mattstrayer 12y ago

aravan 12y ago
I was doing research on anti-piracy, torrent kills all the file sharing portal more than government. File share portals comes directly under law of punishment for hosting and sharing infringed content. Torrent is a general public, mass, there could be many ways to protect innocence against strict law. Hoping that rapidshare made enough money, may try to leave the shit off and spend their time on vocation. These all hall of fame, rise and fall of empire, giving way innovations and technologies.
ghshephard 12y ago
So, that's a business that shuts down gracefully. They clearly identify their last date, and, continue to serve a useful function (for their customers, at least) right up until that date. They even continue to take new customer business right up to 30 days prior to their last day of business. "Kindly note that RapidShare will stop the active service on March 31st, 2015. Extensions of STANDARD PLUS and PREMIUM will be possible until February 28th, 2015."
- m_mueller 12y ago
  Well they're Swiss after all ;).
- Paul12345534 12y ago
  This isn't exactly a graceful shutdown. The majority of their files were already deleted in the past on very short notice. I have no idea who still used or trusted their service.
mmastrac 12y ago
Torrentfreak has some good editorializing and context around this shutdown: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-150210/ https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-... "Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. Among other things, the company adopted one of the most restrictive sharing policies while (re)branding itself as a personal cloud storage service. "The anti-piracy measures seemed to work, but as a result RapidShare’s visitor numbers plunged. The dwindling revenues eventually cost most of RapidShare’s employees their jobs."
- DangerousPie 12y ago
  I don't see how this could have ever ended any other way. RapidShare was clearly only popular in the first place because of piracy. Once they started restricting that they became just another Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive competitor.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Nah. As mentioned before, they were a great place to store all manner of random files. During their golden age, having a place to put random "stuff", especially large files, was a killer feature. The problem was their new model completely precluded sharing of any kind. Imagine Drive or Dropbox, but without the ability to give links to your files, and you can see how useless the service became. You don't out-dropbox Dropbox. As usual, lawyers ruin everything.
    - res0nat0r 12y ago
      Lawyers didn't really ruin this, RapidShare banking on piracy to sustain their business model ruined their business.
      - hueving 12y ago
        Well piracy wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for the lawyers.
        DangerousPie 12y ago
        Lawyers neither make nor enforce the laws. If you want to blame someone, blame the lawmakers...
  - bigbugbag 12y ago
    Well a file sharing platform got popular due to file sharing taking place, sort of obvious isn't it. Then those who built an industry out of controlling distribution who are threatened by these new ways use their acquired power to shut down the threat by claiming copyright infringement, stuttering history (see 17th century french button makers, 19th century theatrophone, and so on). Thing is sharing is a human trait, a trait required to live in a social group. The internet is about sharing and either the copyright industry will adapt/disappear or the internet will disappear (probable eaten alive by fecesbookians and politicians).
nezza-_- 12y ago
When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net. I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. It's sad that there's basically no way for an organisation like archive.org to archive things from sharehosters given the unclear (or quite clearly black/gray) law situation and also the missing cooperation with the sharehosters themselves.
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  torrents are a reasonable solution for sharing those kind of programs.
  - JoshTriplett 12y ago
    Not really; nothing guarantees that someone keeps seeding them forever.
    - thisjepisje 12y ago
      "Reasonable", not "absolutely infallible".
      - vacri 12y ago
        Unseeded torrents are pretty common, especially for less popular items.
        slang800 12y ago
        In my experience, unseeded torrents are less common than Rapidshare links that have been removed by their user or taken down after being reported. However, I've never gathered statistics on it, so this is purely anecdotal.
    - 12y ago
throwaway75394 12y ago
I've interviewed an ex rapidshare employee some time ago. Might have been just one disgruntled ex employee, but they told me the CEO wouldn't hand out access to the servers to anyone and insisted on keep doing that himself and other stuff. They weren't competent though, so maybe he just didn't want to give that employee access. I asked them what they did at Rapidshare and the only answer I got was "multicore stuff" (sic). However it seemed inviteable, Rapidshare tried to rebrand to a personal cloud storage provider without providing the features needed to be one while still cracking down on piracy. Maybe they should have pulled a dotcom, shut rapidshare down and announce rapid. And then stick to the old business model.
- caractacus 12y ago
  They also refused to change their name. The founder wouldn't rebrand. They had a decent chance, if you think about it: storage know-how, a bunch of servers, some good techies, and - which could have been the killer - a Swiss location with Swiss data privacy laws, right in the Snowden era. Forget Dropbox and google drive and amazon with the NSA tapping into them here and wherever. Could have been a great selling point. But the owner couldn't face 'swissshare' or 'swissbox' or something else... had to keep Rapidshare with all that implied.
curiously 12y ago
man I had the most amazing time with Rapidshare during the 2007~2009 era. I remember being in an all you can eat candy store. Same with megaupload. Stuff you couldn't find anywhere were popping up, old vintage rare tv shows, games, magazines. The monetary incentive provided an explosion of content you couldn't get elsewhere. I will really miss the golden era of filehosting services.
- dajohnson89 12y ago
  There should be a public list of cool stuff on RapidShare. That way, people can sift through all the pr0n/Disney movies and start archiving this stuff in a distributed sense. That way, the artifacts aren't lost forever.
  - RayLau135 12y ago
    There was load of blog sites which kept posting up new stuff with links back to Rapidshare in the footer, but older page just ended up have dead links as the content got deleted.
  - RayLau135 12y ago
    Google used to be able to index Rapidshare so you could just search for files on via Google
- izolate 12y ago
  We got a glimpse of what life would be like with free access to culture. I hope to see such a rich community again soon.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
    Three words. Private torrent trackers.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
adrianlmm 12y ago
Anyone remember those hard to figure out capchas Rapidshare had? specially the cats.
pekk 12y ago
We could assume that Rapidshare got shut down because of evil copyright blah blah... Or maybe they just couldn't compete with Dropbox et al.
- hueving 12y ago
  Well it's both. Copyright crap eliminates the market they were in. Then they were forced to compete in a different market with established players (e.g Dropbox)
rosstex 12y ago
Good, their new premium features shut out large treasures of content on the web.
jorjordandan 12y ago
I like the "187,864 users trusted rapidshare in the last hour" in the bottom left corner of the announcement...nice touch lol
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 12y ago
I'm surprised they never adopted to the cloud model of their competitors such as Dropbox, surely they would of had the resources (at least the hardware) to compete. Such a shame.
RayLau135 12y ago
I completely forgot about RapidShare till I saw this, I'm probably not the only one...
- redlotus 12y ago
  LOL me too. I have switched to torrent since megaupload was banned.
sandworm 12y ago
Rapidshare died because the market moved on. "File hosting services" like rapidshare have been replaced by cutthroat "cyberlockers" like Keep2share and rapidgator. The most successful cyberlockers do what Rapidshare decided not to: pay uploaders, even those who share illegally. And also pay linking sites through referral schemes far more resilient legally. They aren't trying to appease anyone not either a customer or a very active uploader. Working with copyright owners beyond base legal requirements (DMCA et al) isn't the business plan anymore. Getting into bed with copyright owners was megaupload's and rapidshare's first mistake. The new plan is to make as much money is possible then abandon the ship the moment the MPAA looks their way. Filesharers are ok with this. They purchase monthly subscriptions in full knowledge that the service might disappear any day. They aren't looking for a long term relationship anymore. The blind panic resulting from the megaupload raid ended that expectation.
- quangv 12y ago
  what's the difference betwwen a "cyberlocker" and a "file hosting service" ?
  - sandworm 12y ago
    A hosting service pretends to be a dropbox-style service for backing up and sharing important files. A cyberlocker abandons the pretense, all but calling for people to share files they don't own in exchange for money. For me, the line is when you start paying website that host links to files on your service (referrals) or when you reward known pirates even after, literally, hundreds of valid takedown notices against their files.
- undefined0 12y ago
  I partly disagree with this. It's true that there is a crowd of uploaders who do it for profit, but Putlocker/Firedrive discontinued their affiliate system in 2012 and continued to be one of the most popular file hosts (yes, they closed down now but that's because they operated in the uk and had issues). Zippyshare also remains very popular when it doesn't pay uploaders either. Vkontakte is another popular file sharing site in addition to 4shared (but 4shared recently started being very strict to copyrighted files). Argubly one could argue that megaupload was mainly used by non-profit uploaders. It gained popularity with affiliates but afterwards the average person and non-profit uploaders used the website to upload files more than the affiliate users. I believe you had to become a premium member to actually gain access to the rewards feature. Rapidshare died because not only did they combat copyrighted files, they also blocked the ability to share legit files. As pointed out in the comments elsewhere in this thread, they tried to out-Dropbox Dropbox. edit: also, Mediafire before they went all-cloud had no affiliate system and is very popular. And look at Mega.co.nz, a very popular website which is used for movies etc.
SyneRyder 12y ago
Even as an indie software developer, this makes me sad. Rapidshare was the most responsive to copyright complaints out of all the filesharing sites, they took down links within 2 hours of being reported. But instead of nuking cracks to my software on Rapidshare immediately, it meant I let the Rapidshare links stay alive longer, because I knew I could turn them off whenever I wanted. I'd rather people uploaded cracks to RapidShare where I could see how popular / unpopular a link was & had control over when to remove it, than somewhere like MegaUpload that would deliberately take a long time to remove links. I never saw evidence of piracy helping sales (always hurt sales) and I never used it for promotion, but I was more worried about cracks that came bundled with a virus, or that came bundled with a collection of illegal images. That stuff had to be nuked straight away for the protection of customers (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software).
- venomsnake 12y ago
  Can you provide some info about the way piracy hurt sales - like - when a crack appears for new version, suddenly sales plummet until new version is out?
- donkeyd 12y ago
  Wow dude, props for referring to people who crack your software as 'customers' and going through the trouble of protecting them. Most companies don't even realize that things like this can actually hurt their image.
- onli 12y ago
  > (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software). I never saw that. Even when I was young, that was something obvious, and I never heard someone else mention that he beliefs cracks come from the company making the original software. Where is that coming from? Is that your impression because you get support requests for cracks?
  - SyneRyder 12y ago
    Yup, I get some support requests where I have to explain to the customer that they never bought the software. They'll tell me the Photoshop Tutorial they downloaded my software from, inevitably with a link to a Rapidshare download. They're not looking at URLs and might not even understand they're downloading from a different website to the tutorial. Some have told me they got my software from "a Photoshop Tutorial that you advertised your software on". Ugh. It's worth noting that while I have customers of all ages, many are older / elderly (many in their late 60s and a few in their 80s & 90s). They're not the most tech savvy, they don't understand the cracking scene & some need a lot of time-consuming handholding. Often wonderful & friendly folks, but they don't grok computers the same way the usual Hacker News reader will.
DigitalSea 12y ago
Is anyone else here surprised that Rapidshare is still even a thing and lasted this long in the face of Mediashare, Megaupload, Zippyshare and all those other sites? I haven't seen a Rapidshare link shared in a very long time. I remember once upon a time if you downloaded leaked music or even software, then Rapidshare was the go to site for that kind of thing. Funny how things change.
- Shorel 12y ago
  For me the service to use was eDonkey/eMule. You could find anything there. Nowadays it's mostly torrents.
pje 12y ago
goodnight sweet prince/and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
- RankingMember 12y ago
  Many memories of waiting for their little countdown timer to finish so I could click the "Free download" link, switching to another tab during the countdown, and then forgetting to come back in time before the download link became stale and having to do it all over again.
mirimir 12y ago
It's not that hard to create a Tor hidden service, locally or on a VPS or hosted server. And using OnionShare <https://onionshare.org/> https://onionshare.org/> it's trivial.
gsam 12y ago
Rapidshare links have continuously died whether they were legit or not for a long while. Sure, a lot of it was illegitimate, but people simply moved on.
ing33k 12y ago
imo they failed to adopt to the Cloud Model . one interesting company which I think pivoted form being a similar site to cloud/backup space is Mediafire http://www.mediafire.com/ http://www.mediafire.com/
jafingi 12y ago
It actually happened later than I would have thought. Rapidshare built their entire brand around warez uploading and piracy, so when they changed their concept to please anti-pirate organizations, it was just a matter of time.
Paul12345534 12y ago
Rapidshare shafted their paid users long ago (announcing the deletion of files on short notice) then they came back with a business model that was not exactly well thought-out.
arcticf0x 12y ago
I remember it being the pirate king in the old days. Won't miss it much now.
gtirloni 12y ago
Reminds me of Xoom [1]. It's very hard to pivot a legit business when you're basically know as the best place to download pirated software/music/games. [1] -http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/home http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/h...
Chirael 12y ago
Back to BBSs?
mostafaberg 12y ago
To me Rapidshare was a very shady place to be full of warez, never visited, never cared. good riddance
onderkalaci 12y ago
RapidShare was my childhood hero! I think appearance of google drive/dropbox is the main reason of this. People easily share data with them.
JDL2 12y ago
Hi, I came across this thread whilst searching for info on File Hosting and there's certainly a lot of good information here. I'm writing an app that uploads small documents to public file hosting sites (e.g. via REST-HTTP Post) so that others can download them again, preferably via simple HTTP GET. Rather than coding to a particular API for each and every Hosting site, are there any public code libraries (preferably C++ or C#) that do this already presenting a common API across a number of different supported hosting sites? Ideally I'd be looking for an Apache/MIT license code rather than GNU.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

388 points by mattstrayer 12y ago

I was doing research on anti-piracy, torrent kills all the file sharing portal more than government. File share portals comes directly under law of punishment for hosting and sharing infringed content. Torrent is a general public, mass, there could be many ways to protect innocence against strict law. Hoping that rapidshare made enough money, may try to leave the shit off and spend their time on vocation. These all hall of fame, rise and fall of empire, giving way innovations and technologies.

ghshephard 12y ago

So, that's a business that shuts down gracefully. They clearly identify their last date, and, continue to serve a useful function (for their customers, at least) right up until that date. They even continue to take new customer business right up to 30 days prior to their last day of business. "Kindly note that RapidShare will stop the active service on March 31st, 2015. Extensions of STANDARD PLUS and PREMIUM will be possible until February 28th, 2015."

m_mueller 12y ago
Well they're Swiss after all ;).
Paul12345534 12y ago
This isn't exactly a graceful shutdown. The majority of their files were already deleted in the past on very short notice. I have no idea who still used or trusted their service.

mmastrac 12y ago

Torrentfreak has some good editorializing and context around this shutdown: https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-150210/ https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-... "Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. Among other things, the company adopted one of the most restrictive sharing policies while (re)branding itself as a personal cloud storage service. "The anti-piracy measures seemed to work, but as a result RapidShare’s visitor numbers plunged. The dwindling revenues eventually cost most of RapidShare’s employees their jobs."

DangerousPie 12y ago
I don't see how this could have ever ended any other way. RapidShare was clearly only popular in the first place because of piracy. Once they started restricting that they became just another Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive competitor.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Nah. As mentioned before, they were a great place to store all manner of random files. During their golden age, having a place to put random "stuff", especially large files, was a killer feature. The problem was their new model completely precluded sharing of any kind. Imagine Drive or Dropbox, but without the ability to give links to your files, and you can see how useless the service became. You don't out-dropbox Dropbox. As usual, lawyers ruin everything.
  - res0nat0r 12y ago
    Lawyers didn't really ruin this, RapidShare banking on piracy to sustain their business model ruined their business.
    - hueving 12y ago
      Well piracy wouldn't have been a problem if it weren't for the lawyers.
      - DangerousPie 12y ago
        Lawyers neither make nor enforce the laws. If you want to blame someone, blame the lawmakers...
- bigbugbag 12y ago
  Well a file sharing platform got popular due to file sharing taking place, sort of obvious isn't it. Then those who built an industry out of controlling distribution who are threatened by these new ways use their acquired power to shut down the threat by claiming copyright infringement, stuttering history (see 17th century french button makers, 19th century theatrophone, and so on). Thing is sharing is a human trait, a trait required to live in a social group. The internet is about sharing and either the copyright industry will adapt/disappear or the internet will disappear (probable eaten alive by fecesbookians and politicians).

nezza-_- 12y ago

When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting things just disappeared from the net. I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck. It's sad that there's basically no way for an organisation like archive.org to archive things from sharehosters given the unclear (or quite clearly black/gray) law situation and also the missing cooperation with the sharehosters themselves.

throwawayaway 12y ago
torrents are a reasonable solution for sharing those kind of programs.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  Not really; nothing guarantees that someone keeps seeding them forever.
  - thisjepisje 12y ago
    "Reasonable", not "absolutely infallible".
    - vacri 12y ago
      Unseeded torrents are pretty common, especially for less popular items.
      - slang800 12y ago
        In my experience, unseeded torrents are less common than Rapidshare links that have been removed by their user or taken down after being reported. However, I've never gathered statistics on it, so this is purely anecdotal.
  - 12y ago

throwaway75394 12y ago

I've interviewed an ex rapidshare employee some time ago. Might have been just one disgruntled ex employee, but they told me the CEO wouldn't hand out access to the servers to anyone and insisted on keep doing that himself and other stuff. They weren't competent though, so maybe he just didn't want to give that employee access. I asked them what they did at Rapidshare and the only answer I got was "multicore stuff" (sic). However it seemed inviteable, Rapidshare tried to rebrand to a personal cloud storage provider without providing the features needed to be one while still cracking down on piracy. Maybe they should have pulled a dotcom, shut rapidshare down and announce rapid. And then stick to the old business model.

caractacus 12y ago
They also refused to change their name. The founder wouldn't rebrand. They had a decent chance, if you think about it: storage know-how, a bunch of servers, some good techies, and - which could have been the killer - a Swiss location with Swiss data privacy laws, right in the Snowden era. Forget Dropbox and google drive and amazon with the NSA tapping into them here and wherever. Could have been a great selling point. But the owner couldn't face 'swissshare' or 'swissbox' or something else... had to keep Rapidshare with all that implied.

curiously 12y ago

man I had the most amazing time with Rapidshare during the 2007~2009 era. I remember being in an all you can eat candy store. Same with megaupload. Stuff you couldn't find anywhere were popping up, old vintage rare tv shows, games, magazines. The monetary incentive provided an explosion of content you couldn't get elsewhere. I will really miss the golden era of filehosting services.

dajohnson89 12y ago
There should be a public list of cool stuff on RapidShare. That way, people can sift through all the pr0n/Disney movies and start archiving this stuff in a distributed sense. That way, the artifacts aren't lost forever.
- RayLau135 12y ago
  There was load of blog sites which kept posting up new stuff with links back to Rapidshare in the footer, but older page just ended up have dead links as the content got deleted.
- RayLau135 12y ago
  Google used to be able to index Rapidshare so you could just search for files on via Google
izolate 12y ago
We got a glimpse of what life would be like with free access to culture. I hope to see such a rich community again soon.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
  Three words. Private torrent trackers.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

adrianlmm 12y ago

Anyone remember those hard to figure out capchas Rapidshare had? specially the cats.

pekk 12y ago

We could assume that Rapidshare got shut down because of evil copyright blah blah... Or maybe they just couldn't compete with Dropbox et al.

hueving 12y ago
Well it's both. Copyright crap eliminates the market they were in. Then they were forced to compete in a different market with established players (e.g Dropbox)

rosstex 12y ago

Good, their new premium features shut out large treasures of content on the web.

jorjordandan 12y ago

I like the "187,864 users trusted rapidshare in the last hour" in the bottom left corner of the announcement...nice touch lol

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

giancarlostoro 12y ago

I'm surprised they never adopted to the cloud model of their competitors such as Dropbox, surely they would of had the resources (at least the hardware) to compete. Such a shame.

RayLau135 12y ago

I completely forgot about RapidShare till I saw this, I'm probably not the only one...

redlotus 12y ago
LOL me too. I have switched to torrent since megaupload was banned.

sandworm 12y ago

Rapidshare died because the market moved on. "File hosting services" like rapidshare have been replaced by cutthroat "cyberlockers" like Keep2share and rapidgator. The most successful cyberlockers do what Rapidshare decided not to: pay uploaders, even those who share illegally. And also pay linking sites through referral schemes far more resilient legally. They aren't trying to appease anyone not either a customer or a very active uploader. Working with copyright owners beyond base legal requirements (DMCA et al) isn't the business plan anymore. Getting into bed with copyright owners was megaupload's and rapidshare's first mistake. The new plan is to make as much money is possible then abandon the ship the moment the MPAA looks their way. Filesharers are ok with this. They purchase monthly subscriptions in full knowledge that the service might disappear any day. They aren't looking for a long term relationship anymore. The blind panic resulting from the megaupload raid ended that expectation.

quangv 12y ago
what's the difference betwwen a "cyberlocker" and a "file hosting service" ?
- sandworm 12y ago
  A hosting service pretends to be a dropbox-style service for backing up and sharing important files. A cyberlocker abandons the pretense, all but calling for people to share files they don't own in exchange for money. For me, the line is when you start paying website that host links to files on your service (referrals) or when you reward known pirates even after, literally, hundreds of valid takedown notices against their files.
undefined0 12y ago
I partly disagree with this. It's true that there is a crowd of uploaders who do it for profit, but Putlocker/Firedrive discontinued their affiliate system in 2012 and continued to be one of the most popular file hosts (yes, they closed down now but that's because they operated in the uk and had issues). Zippyshare also remains very popular when it doesn't pay uploaders either. Vkontakte is another popular file sharing site in addition to 4shared (but 4shared recently started being very strict to copyrighted files). Argubly one could argue that megaupload was mainly used by non-profit uploaders. It gained popularity with affiliates but afterwards the average person and non-profit uploaders used the website to upload files more than the affiliate users. I believe you had to become a premium member to actually gain access to the rewards feature. Rapidshare died because not only did they combat copyrighted files, they also blocked the ability to share legit files. As pointed out in the comments elsewhere in this thread, they tried to out-Dropbox Dropbox. edit: also, Mediafire before they went all-cloud had no affiliate system and is very popular. And look at Mega.co.nz, a very popular website which is used for movies etc.

SyneRyder 12y ago

Even as an indie software developer, this makes me sad. Rapidshare was the most responsive to copyright complaints out of all the filesharing sites, they took down links within 2 hours of being reported. But instead of nuking cracks to my software on Rapidshare immediately, it meant I let the Rapidshare links stay alive longer, because I knew I could turn them off whenever I wanted. I'd rather people uploaded cracks to RapidShare where I could see how popular / unpopular a link was & had control over when to remove it, than somewhere like MegaUpload that would deliberately take a long time to remove links. I never saw evidence of piracy helping sales (always hurt sales) and I never used it for promotion, but I was more worried about cracks that came bundled with a virus, or that came bundled with a collection of illegal images. That stuff had to be nuked straight away for the protection of customers (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software).

venomsnake 12y ago
Can you provide some info about the way piracy hurt sales - like - when a crack appears for new version, suddenly sales plummet until new version is out?
donkeyd 12y ago
Wow dude, props for referring to people who crack your software as 'customers' and going through the trouble of protecting them. Most companies don't even realize that things like this can actually hurt their image.
onli 12y ago
> (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the company that makes the software). I never saw that. Even when I was young, that was something obvious, and I never heard someone else mention that he beliefs cracks come from the company making the original software. Where is that coming from? Is that your impression because you get support requests for cracks?
- SyneRyder 12y ago
  Yup, I get some support requests where I have to explain to the customer that they never bought the software. They'll tell me the Photoshop Tutorial they downloaded my software from, inevitably with a link to a Rapidshare download. They're not looking at URLs and might not even understand they're downloading from a different website to the tutorial. Some have told me they got my software from "a Photoshop Tutorial that you advertised your software on". Ugh. It's worth noting that while I have customers of all ages, many are older / elderly (many in their late 60s and a few in their 80s & 90s). They're not the most tech savvy, they don't understand the cracking scene & some need a lot of time-consuming handholding. Often wonderful & friendly folks, but they don't grok computers the same way the usual Hacker News reader will.

DigitalSea 12y ago

Is anyone else here surprised that Rapidshare is still even a thing and lasted this long in the face of Mediashare, Megaupload, Zippyshare and all those other sites? I haven't seen a Rapidshare link shared in a very long time. I remember once upon a time if you downloaded leaked music or even software, then Rapidshare was the go to site for that kind of thing. Funny how things change.

Shorel 12y ago
For me the service to use was eDonkey/eMule. You could find anything there. Nowadays it's mostly torrents.

pje 12y ago

goodnight sweet prince/and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

RankingMember 12y ago
Many memories of waiting for their little countdown timer to finish so I could click the "Free download" link, switching to another tab during the countdown, and then forgetting to come back in time before the download link became stale and having to do it all over again.

mirimir 12y ago

It's not that hard to create a Tor hidden service, locally or on a VPS or hosted server. And using OnionShare <https://onionshare.org/> https://onionshare.org/> it's trivial.

gsam 12y ago

Rapidshare links have continuously died whether they were legit or not for a long while. Sure, a lot of it was illegitimate, but people simply moved on.

ing33k 12y ago

imo they failed to adopt to the Cloud Model . one interesting company which I think pivoted form being a similar site to cloud/backup space is Mediafire http://www.mediafire.com/ http://www.mediafire.com/

jafingi 12y ago

It actually happened later than I would have thought. Rapidshare built their entire brand around warez uploading and piracy, so when they changed their concept to please anti-pirate organizations, it was just a matter of time.

Paul12345534 12y ago

Rapidshare shafted their paid users long ago (announcing the deletion of files on short notice) then they came back with a business model that was not exactly well thought-out.

arcticf0x 12y ago

I remember it being the pirate king in the old days. Won't miss it much now.

gtirloni 12y ago

Reminds me of Xoom [1]. It's very hard to pivot a legit business when you're basically know as the best place to download pirated software/music/games. [1] -http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/home http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/h...

Chirael 12y ago

Back to BBSs?

mostafaberg 12y ago

To me Rapidshare was a very shady place to be full of warez, never visited, never cared. good riddance

onderkalaci 12y ago

RapidShare was my childhood hero! I think appearance of google drive/dropbox is the main reason of this. People easily share data with them.

JDL2 12y ago

Hi, I came across this thread whilst searching for info on File Hosting and there's certainly a lot of good information here. I'm writing an app that uploads small documents to public file hosting sites (e.g. via REST-HTTP Post) so that others can download them again, preferably via simple HTTP GET. Rather than coding to a particular API for each and every Hosting site, are there any public code libraries (preferably C++ or C#) that do this already presenting a common API across a number of different supported hosting sites? Ideally I'd be looking for an Apache/MIT license code rather than GNU.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]