Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

They make it that annoying so you'll pay for a premium account that removes all the annoying crap (and improves speed, removes download caps).

And anyway, they provide a valuable service: illegal file sharing using only Google and HTTP. I've long since abandoned networks like gnutella, edonkey, bittorrent, etc in favor of a good blog search engine and file-downloading sites. Similarly there's hundreds of streaming video sites to watch TV series on without the need to download. I can ignore an ad here or there for the convenience of pirating media from any web browser in the world.



I can understand non-commercial piracy, but these download sites are evil parasites. It's a clever business model, though.


Bandwidth costs money. Hosting costs money. They can't just let hundreds of thousands of people download gigabytes at a time at >5Mbps for free. Peer to peer networks don't have huge resource drains on anything but the bandwidth of ISPs.


I'm not suggesting that they should operate for free; I'm suggesting that they should not operate at all. They're basically monetizing piracy.


protip: VLC can play incomplete files.


As does any decent media player.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: