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Comment by barrybe | Hacker News Reader

Some thoughts:

1) Being forced to click "Trust" just to watch a video is pretty bad, and would turn away many of your users.

2) Having an alert box "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" is also pretty bad, and unnecessary.

Overall, I can see the value that this technology gives to you (less bandwidth). But what value do you give to the consumer? Why would I want to endure the various hassles of this site, and give up some my scarce upstream bandwidth, when I could just go to Youtube or Vimeo instead?

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Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

1) You're right: It's bad, but in order to open connections to different clients it needs a signed applet. I also considered a custom plugin but I thought forcing a user to install it could be ever worse. Do you have any better idea?

2) True, will remove it.

I think reducing publisher's costs could lead to benefits even for consumers, I'm thinking about hd videos.

Dont forget many ISP's HATE torrenting and P2P. I ran a small ISP in our village a year or so back before BT got of their bums and 90% of the BW was used by 5% of the users - through torrenting. It really hammers a network.

If you employed this technology & it took off I suspect you would be faced with very angry ISP's who may well ban access from their networks.

Plus of course it eats right into the users BW - they theoretically will upload more than they download and with limited BW allowances people could easily start gettign traffic shaped without even knowing why!

That said it's a neat solution to the BW problem.. something of a catch 22.

Bittorrent doesn't eat bandwidth, stupid users who can't configure their torrent clients properly eat bandwidth.

nah, it really does :) think how much outbound data there is, it really fouls up the local part of the network.

Amount of outbound data? If you're sharing a video, the outgoing stream should be equal to the incoming stream (you're downloading from one place and uploading somewhere else simultaneously). On average, peers must upload exactly as much as they download.

yes but generally you upload simultaneously to several people - that has a big impact (less so on BW but on load there). Plus if you have multiple prior downloads (obviously not so applicable here) then it starts ro add up if your seeding them.

Ask any ISP :) P2P sucks for them.

Technically it is zero sum, but bittorrent prioritizes peering based on how fast your internet connection is. So somebody on dial-up internet probably isn't going to upload to anyone, while someone who has high speed internet is going to upload to many people. So somebody with high speed internet access might upload twice as much data as they downloaded.

And while I don't think ISPs really care about you maxing out a phone line, they will notice you maxing out a broadband line. And bittorent will do that.

For 1, I don't know of any good workarounds. I think it might be wise to have an intermediate page that says: "You are about to see a dialog box that looks like this, click on 'Trust' when you see it". That way fewer people will be scared off. Having a "tutorial" page is pretty common in other websites that have some kind of trust/installation process.

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