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Comment by thirdplace_ | Hacker News Reader

Like IRC, Bittorrent lacks convenience and a nice UX which seems to be required for mass adoption. Most people use dropbox for transferring large files. Some even use email as file transfer if it's below some maximum size (20-50 MB).

I have never actually created a torrent and I use the technology mostly for grabbing debian installer images etc.

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>Bittorrent lacks convenience and a nice UX which seems to be required for mass adoption.

I thought it did have mass adoption.

My sister uses it, my Grandpa uses it, and pretty much every single person who watched Game of Thrones back in the day used it too.

(There was no way for Australians to watch Game of Thrones legally, the same day it came out in the US, until maybe season 3. Even then it was linked to a $90/month cable TV plan in a country with low cable adoption rates. Hence everybody torrented it and/or shared it with their workmates on USB sticks.)

Plenty of people just use putlocker or similar sites when pirating rather than torrents. Especially where I am (Germany) since fines for torrenting are extremely common.

Germans should vote out the politicians that allow this crap.

All German parties with even a slight adoption rate want this, not just via lobbying. There's no choice.

It's also not a "deal breaker" for a lot of people, same as with recent privacy-unfriendly laws(Bundestrojaner, Vorratsdatenspeicherung, etc).

Are they actually common? I hear stories about it here, but have never come across it IRL.

The stories of people having their access limited mostly seems to be PR from industry groups and VPN companies.

I got burned twice by this. Once for some shitty music and years later for a mediocre tv series I could have just watched on my Amazon TV stick instead. The first time I got away by just claiming it wasn't me and promising I'd make sure to prevent any copyright infringement from my connection in the future. There are lawyers who don't do anything else but scan bittorrent traffic all day and shotgun these threats. Mostly from Munich.

Games are free game though, also anything from Usenet is fine. Nowadays you could probably get away with a free ipv6 tunnel too, since adoption is high enough.

Loyal Pirate Gary voter here. Arrrrrr.

I know multiple people who've gotten one personally. They are perhaps a bit less common now as less people torrent without a VPN.

Fair enough. I guess it's different in Germany, then.

I find both IRC and bittorrent to have a superb UX. It's minimal, highly interoperable and programmatically accessible. I've had sketchy experiences getting a connection between two specific peers though. I presumed it was NAT traversal being finnicky.

> I've had sketchy experiences getting a connection between two specific peers though. I presumed it was NAT traversal being finnicky.

And that is probably are IPv4's flaws, not BitTorrent. If everyone switched to IPv6 then they can connect to each other without using NAT, because IPv6 address space is so big everybody on earth can have their own unique IP address.

People would still have to open a hole in their firewall, and then we’re back to people implementing UPnP

At least on IPv6 people know it's caused by their firewall, which they can fix on their own.

On IPv4 you don't know if your packets got dropped because of your firewall blocking some ports, or because ISP's CGNAT get overloaded and decide to drop your packets (and customers can't do anything to fix that)

> I find both IRC and bittorrent to have a superb UX. It's minimal, highly interoperable and programmatically accessible.

I agree, but there's no way my mom could figure out IRC on her own. She uses Dropbox daily, though.

Anyone who can use a web browser can use IRC.

E.g.

https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/irc.libera.chat:+6697#irc

https://web.libera.chat/?channels=#irc

There are also mobile apps with better persistence and even simpler interfaces.

IRC will never take over the world because:

* The protocol is missing some minor but important UX-enhancing features. This is fixable, but there's nothing valuable enough about the existing userbase for a capitalized entity to bother working with the entrenched groups. And non-capitalized entities move relatively slowly.

* There is no profit in it -- the corps who want to own messaging want to own messaging. This is a great idea for them, but a terrible idea for users.

* IRC networks don't want Eternal September to happen to them. Not that anyone is beating down their door.

> IRC networks don't want Eternal September to happen to them. Not that anyone is beating down their door.

Too late for that. In late 90's/early 00's, you had web clients for IRC.

Before the WWW ordinary people did figure out IRC. It's just that people have got used to a different kind of UX - arguably what we have now is more complicated and harder to understand.

Yeah when I was in middle school in the late 90's all the normal girls hung out on IRC using mIRC. What killed IRC was more mobile I think, since once you need to set up a bouncer and stuff it actually gets difficult.

IRC is missing many features that people expect these days though, whereas I don't think Bittorrent is. Bittorrent has definitely done a better job at evolving than IRC has too. E.g. with the DHT, magnet links, webtorrent, etc.

IRC doesn't even support basic text formatting, let alone links, images, emojis, threads, etc.

You're far from wrong, but I would quibble with a couple of points. Specifically, IRC does support basic text formatting; I've written a client library [1] to implement it. It's not very comprehensive or at all well specified, though. Some clients can handle emoji, links, and images, but it is client-dependent.

[1] https://github.com/aaron-em/rcirc-styles.el

Oh, it's actually very easy to create a torrent, and I used it multiple times to transfer files for, say, a LAN party (games and/or patches).

It works much better with a tracker, though. Webtorrent is quite promising for the future, I believe you are looking for something like https://wormhole.app/ ?

It has a few features that other sites lack: resumable uploads, the recipient can start downloading before uploading is finished, no maximum file size (above 5 GB the file isn't stored on the server anymore this is just p2p and need to leave your browser open).

The situation would be different if browsers had it built-in.

Perhaps it could be mutually beneficial. If Firefox had a Bittorrent client, both could gain popularity?

I never understood why browsers don’t natively support torrents so one can just <img src=“torrent://…”/>.

Opera did.

This feels like a troll post.

Neither IRC, nor BitTorrent have anything to do Dropbox. And both were incredibly popular back in the day

People use Dropbox because you don't need to open ports

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