Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (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.
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.
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.
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.
The typical ones were things like MMA/UFC/boxing, and those I'd say no to because their business model revolves around PPV; things like NCAA sports I said no to because I refused to profit off children (NIL didn't exist at the time) and that the implementation would have required me to "integrate" more than 5 different services just to attempt parity; I'd get the occasional EPL or UEFA requests, too.
I really didn't have any significant demand for these. One of my litmus tests, besides demand, was "okay, can this be as good as the other sports' implementations?" I was always concerned about feature parity—I could have provided radio feeds for MLB but not for NBA, and that would cause people to say "well they have radio feeds for x but not y" and create confusion as to what is what. Being consistent in this regard was important.
The run-of-the-mill IPTV requests came and went, and I just wasn't interested in that. Ultimately I made the site for me so I could watch sports, I just had some other people watching with me.
Thanks for asking. No, not yet, I'm working on introducing myself to their legal team with hopes that they might be able to take that as serious enough to believe I am me.
You should reach out to Scott Chacon - he's very accessible and I feel like he'd be sympathetic to your situation and could fix everything up quite quickly.
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
> I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop
That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup, though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I hadn't gotten around to it.)
I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew I had once already paid for one once.
Except I would have been allowed to install it on that laptop, I just didn't have the original media with me, and I also did not care.
I also, again already having paid for the original license years before, got a cracked Warcraft III Russian edition (offline only, no BattleNet, obviously), so if you want to tell more stories to show what a bad person I am, here is one more to add.
I did watch a lot of movies in my life that I never paid for though, so there is that. If they ever have one reasonable ad-free subscription that covers them all (also across borders, like Asian anime) I promise to sign up for that. Haven't watched anything at all in over a decade though, except for the occasional Twitch or Youtube. I don't even have a TV.
I guess for some people making sure everybody follows the rules is more important than anything else. I admit that I am the occasional rule breaker, including as a pedestrian crossing a red light when I feel stopping all traffic just for little me when there are plenty of large gaps in traffic is more reasonable.
So yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'm not a model citizen. I don't even feel bad about it. Also, physical goods are obviously exactly the same, so your made-up story is totally relevant, and nobody asks the question why you changed it from a virtual to a physical good when you had complete artistic freedom. Maybe your story would not be as convincing?
I don't understand. (For example: what you mean "except" and how much of a bad person you are and the tone of your last paragraph?) It sounds like you're arguing with me (and you think I'm arguing with you).
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.
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.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.
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.
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.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things.
My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't. If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then don't. If you can't make money writing books about the intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't entitled to earn a living just because you create music, movies or writings in our current society. If we're going to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over time, which one's are which start to change. It happened to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the benefit.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.
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.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
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$.
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.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
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."
Don't overestimate your success. I remember reading the original prison post and (a) seeing how thick the attempt to do that sort of "shaping" was, and (b) still coming away thinking, "Just... wow" (not in a good way).
Even if it seems like you're winning because all you're seeing is people falling over themselves to tell you how awesome your story is and how awesome you are, take a look around the room. If it's a room of 10 and the praise is really only coming from 6 people, don't neglect to account for the fact that there are 4 other people in the room who are also capable of thought, and they probably have thoughts (and the fact that they can see the other 6 people reacting the way they are can be a factor in whether to voice them).
> 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'.
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.
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.
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.
That is a perfectly valid point. Don't send fun emails if you can't write fun emails. Humor is an absolute minefield to trample through. You have to cater for your audience and if you don't have a set audience you're limited to the lowest common denominator.
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.
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.
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.
If copying isn’t theft then I guess we can stop worrying about open source licensing. Anyone, including corporations, would be able to take open source code and copy it into their own products, reselling it without consent or releasing their changes because they haven’t stolen anything, just copied it, right?
If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?
Of course, if you give people fewer incentives to share their information they can and often will simply keep it private. You can't copy information that people never gave to you, regardless of the law.
I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.
A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen. When I steal your car, phone, bike or milk, you no longer have it, and no longer enjoy the benefit of it. I'm fairly certain that's the part of theft most people have a problem with. If I zap your car and produce a perfect duplicate, and drive that duplicate away, leaving your car as if nothing had ever happened, other than minutiae like the VINs and licence plates being identical, I cannot imagine anyone having a problem with that. Nobody is going to call that theft. If you still believe that's theft, then I cannot understand where you're coming from.
This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi, the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking that copy.
Nah, the people who pretend that definitions in a criminal law book override natural linguistics are being deliberately obtuse. Language exists mostly outside of a courtroom.
Given that identity fraud leads directly into what is functionally actual theft (taking money out of you bank account or taking up loans in your name and scarpering), there's no wonder the term's confused. Doesn't make it theft though.
It isn't legally theft, but because people commonly use the word that way, it is colloquially theft. The qualifications are different. Legal crimes are defined by law. English is defined by its common use. They're not necessarily the same thing.
Just as many wiki's are called Wikipedias, by analogy with the biggest ones; that is, they aren't. Or maybe more fitting here, the word 'download', which can mean data transfer or modification in pretty much any way with a person not knowledgeable about computers.[1] Those uses aren't uncommon, but they are nevertheless wrong.
I think you just finished a circle there, so I don't think there's much reason to continue this line of enquiry, given neither of us is going to change our stance.
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
"IP theft" is not counter to that definition. Intellectual property is a 'something'. That definition, does not require depriving someone else of something. As another valid example, see "identity theft".
Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the users of English absolutely do get to redefine language. That's how all modern English words originated.
And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary, because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or not you agree with the concept politically.
Between these two pages, you should be able to understand why "ip theft" is a bogus term. It's specifically called out in the intellectual property article.
"Unlike other forms of property, intellectual property can be used by infinitely many people without depriving the original owner of the use of their property."
Whereas theft has this definition:
"Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property."
My not-a-lawyer understanding is that we use a common law system in the USA. This means that the definitions for things are based on history, previous cases, and the statutes that have been codified into law. This is a good thing because redefining words can make previously legal actions become illegal. Allowing that to happen at the pace slang develops in the modern era means we will hold people to different standards based on how "hip" they are.
I said you don’t get to redefine what words mean unilaterally. I disagree that enough English speakers agree with the MPA definition for us to adopt it. I sure don’t.
Good thing I don't recognise the existence of that. We live in a society that does, and I despise that. At least the EU has the sense to not recognise software patents, so 'intellectual property' is not all-encompassing. Maybe one day they can loosen the grip further.
> As another valid example, see "identity theft".
'Identity fraud' is a much better term for what this is. Someone using my name, phone number and my mother's maiden name to get money in my name is not stealing my name and phone number; it's just fraud. It's much closer to lying than stealing.
English is not a programming language. You're only disagreeing with my articulation here, which is irrelevant in relation to the thing of the matter - namely what I mean rather than what I type into the keyboard physically.
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series) refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was happening.
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
It started as a proof of concept and graduated to a free site, and eventually I put a paywall up to see if anyone would be willing to pay. Internally, I hoped nobody would—I wanted to have a social life and not be beholden to old men telling me their ghetto streaming site was broken—and I expected nobody would.
The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's worth" model, and after watching the value that others were willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately charge.
You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low quality stream.
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and you'll hit something relevant very quickly
From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the event.
Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally. It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found, it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for next time.
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
TFA says they were pirating live sports streams - live content can't be accessed via torrent trackers, obviously.
I personally don't "get" sports, but I understand that people who do, want it to be a shared experience where everyone is watching the same game and feeling the same emotions at the same time. Even ten seconds of extra latency is bad because you can hear your neighbours cheering before you see the goal get scored, and if you were to download and watch the game 12 hours later, the "magic of the moment" would be gone - might as well just google what the final score was.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
> 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.
Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this microsite was posted previously (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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Solid advice, thank you very much.
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.
The typical ones were things like MMA/UFC/boxing, and those I'd say no to because their business model revolves around PPV; things like NCAA sports I said no to because I refused to profit off children (NIL didn't exist at the time) and that the implementation would have required me to "integrate" more than 5 different services just to attempt parity; I'd get the occasional EPL or UEFA requests, too.
I really didn't have any significant demand for these. One of my litmus tests, besides demand, was "okay, can this be as good as the other sports' implementations?" I was always concerned about feature parity—I could have provided radio feeds for MLB but not for NBA, and that would cause people to say "well they have radio feeds for x but not y" and create confusion as to what is what. Being consistent in this regard was important.
The run-of-the-mill IPTV requests came and went, and I just wasn't interested in that. Ultimately I made the site for me so I could watch sports, I just had some other people watching with me.
Were you aware of the risk you were getting yourself into when you built heheStreams? Did you take any precautions and how did you sleep at night?
I don’t understand how people think that they have a good chance of getting away with something like this?
There must be safer ways to make good money?
It wasn't about the money whatsoever.
Btw you ever got you gh acct back? Really shitty situation, best wishes
Thanks for asking. No, not yet, I'm working on introducing myself to their legal team with hopes that they might be able to take that as serious enough to believe I am me.
You should reach out to Scott Chacon - he's very accessible and I feel like he'd be sympathetic to your situation and could fix everything up quite quickly.
Thanks for the advice, I sent him a note on LinkedIn.
It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models' usually have a far better customer support than legal business models :)
Many years ago I spent two months in Odessa, Ukraine. I lived in a rented apartment not far from the pretty famous half open-air book (and CD/DVD) market (https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market).
I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there (Disclaimer: I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop). I had trouble installing it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an alternative on my laptop. Best service!
PS: Also, Odessa is very beautiful, and I say that as someone who has lived in some beautiful places. -- https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach and park, which would be another equally long video)
Ukrainian here. Odessa is indeed a city on another level. Easily the best city in the country and incredibly nice in the summer. Glad you liked it! <3
I heard "was". due to destruction from russian attacks.
Well, summer or not, it's not really comfy to walk around a city during explosions happening right over your head. Been there, done that.
or walking around ruins, explosions or not
Upvoting this as an Odessit.
> I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it installed on that particular laptop
That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup, though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I hadn't gotten around to it.)
I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew I had once already paid for one once.
Except I would have been allowed to install it on that laptop, I just didn't have the original media with me, and I also did not care.
I also, again already having paid for the original license years before, got a cracked Warcraft III Russian edition (offline only, no BattleNet, obviously), so if you want to tell more stories to show what a bad person I am, here is one more to add.
I did watch a lot of movies in my life that I never paid for though, so there is that. If they ever have one reasonable ad-free subscription that covers them all (also across borders, like Asian anime) I promise to sign up for that. Haven't watched anything at all in over a decade though, except for the occasional Twitch or Youtube. I don't even have a TV.
I guess for some people making sure everybody follows the rules is more important than anything else. I admit that I am the occasional rule breaker, including as a pedestrian crossing a red light when I feel stopping all traffic just for little me when there are plenty of large gaps in traffic is more reasonable.
So yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'm not a model citizen. I don't even feel bad about it. Also, physical goods are obviously exactly the same, so your made-up story is totally relevant, and nobody asks the question why you changed it from a virtual to a physical good when you had complete artistic freedom. Maybe your story would not be as convincing?
I don't understand. (For example: what you mean "except" and how much of a bad person you are and the tone of your last paragraph?) It sounds like you're arguing with me (and you think I'm arguing with you).
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.
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.
But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is not the same. The product for streaming services is by and large the content catalog they offer.
Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music/movies.
This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog offered.
"Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad, but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much more apt word to use.
Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much different from video streaming services where the divergence is dramatic from one to another.
> Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with publishers and offer a completely different catalog of music
What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service, it's on all of them.
That's unfortunately not true.
In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also find a song that is not listed on one but available on another.
https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs
That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but for smaller independent bands it’s not always the case. I am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not both.
The ones that aren’t available on Spotify tend to be self-released but otherwise there isn’t much of a pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be mediocre at best.
And that’s not even mentioning bands that are pulling their music from Spotify in protest…
They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.
"Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may have had some seriously good insights on how to treat your customers.
You're thinking of Daniel Elk (Spotify co-founder and CEO) and Ludvig Strigeus, who ran uTorrent before building Spotify.
Thanks!
it was what.cd, which is how they got their original comprehensive catalog so fast
Citation?
To clarify I'm not suggesting owners of what.cd started spotify just some elite members. I happened to join what.cd before Spotify came out and the tracker was shut down. Initially spotify overlapped with what.cds comprehensive library of rare high quality audio significantly and as they moved out of grey market, over the first year or so, some were removed after complaints or contracts were signed with artists. Then what.cd servers were seized for copyright infingement and other trackers tried to replace it. To download that much data from their platform you'd need to have shared a significant amount yourself for years. They probably used pirate bay and other less comprehensive libraries as well, but the high quality lossless audio that you paid for was likely from what.cd. This was discussed on those tracker forums and irc during that time.
Not OP: https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-pirated-mp3-f...
The article said the Spotify CEO was CEO of uTorrent. And Spotify used files employees got from The Pirate Bay. Not what the HN comments claimed.
I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify, YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to, it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great diversity of other content.
The music streaming services are also the easiest way to pirate music.
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.
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.
Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new desperates, you either take what is offered or you go hungry.
Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this unholy mess.
Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum of activities in reality, and when I use streaming services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the single most important question for me is "How easy does this service make it for me to find new music?", for others, the question might be "What service streams the highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing with "What music is available there vs here" that others already mentioned.
Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality, Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they ended up competing on price and product alone, except for little things.
My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free with ads)
What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get your investment back?
What would stop much larger companies, with more resources, to just keep taking anything good from smaller companies/startup?
This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the only differing factor is support.
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its fault, but the products on offer are much better than the movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was, i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The customer is being provided a better product for less money. That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be artificially inflated because everyone's got their own small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer getting service for pennies is good actually" that you are portraying it as.
If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't. If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then don't. If you can't make money writing books about the intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't entitled to earn a living just because you create music, movies or writings in our current society. If we're going to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over time, which one's are which start to change. It happened to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the benefit.
Wonderful! Again I fail to see how this is supposedly a strong argument against this:
> This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
The music market clearly still exists. There's no reason to believe that the movie market will cease to exist.
20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for a very different world where progress was extremely slow. It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by something better, which is patented again, giving you a series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents so there is still some competition in practice even if questionably legal.
The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone would have set up a streaming service with every show and movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its their comfort show. A service that can provide that without being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for in a streaming service.
I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented in a big readable table rather than five options I have to scroll endlessly through one at a time.
Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to download a "helper."
Aside from that, the experience is rarely terrible - like the trad video streaming sites that give you endless horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
It sounds like we used different sites.
To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming sites.
With usually the best reviews compared to Rotten Tomatoes et.al.
I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.
You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.
> I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better.
IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.
That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.
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.
> and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail pretty quickly for running something like this
This would only happen in developed countries. Nowhere else in the world cares about foreign copyrights being infringed.
This seems like common sense, when you're not fully developed, you spend time caring on the bottom of the necessity triangle, not the top.
MS knows this fairly well, and why they don't go after the low hanging pirates.
It may not be the copyright they care about so much, but strict Muslim countries might find western shows criminally objectionable on moral grounds.
in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on someone else's turf.
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$.
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.
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.
Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught. (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
There are probably many people in prison right now because tor is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you probably also don't have the patience for prison.
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794455
Go to any local market place and you will see ads to buy these streaming sticks with everything setup for you, plug and play.
[dead]
His 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.
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."
> Being able to shape the narrative
Don't overestimate your success. I remember reading the original prison post and (a) seeing how thick the attempt to do that sort of "shaping" was, and (b) still coming away thinking, "Just... wow" (not in a good way).
Even if it seems like you're winning because all you're seeing is people falling over themselves to tell you how awesome your story is and how awesome you are, take a look around the room. If it's a room of 10 and the praise is really only coming from 6 people, don't neglect to account for the fact that there are 4 other people in the room who are also capable of thought, and they probably have thoughts (and the fact that they can see the other 6 people reacting the way they are can be a factor in whether to voice them).
8be5229b62d4a6631d6e4571845ffb0ca5e554dee569e04dbc299f2d72d42211
Josh you are a gift to our society. Too bad it's controlled by crooked villains. Don't ever change.
> 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'.
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.
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.
> 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!"
>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):
Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.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.
That is a perfectly valid point. Don't send fun emails if you can't write fun emails. Humor is an absolute minefield to trample through. You have to cater for your audience and if you don't have a set audience you're limited to the lowest common denominator.
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.
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-hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs
This is relatively new and an interesting business model. There’s also “piracy as a service” https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy...
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.
Pirating of course exists. You might rebrand it, but hardly as hero-, more like theft-. Theftbay would sound good to me.
Copying isn't theft.
If copying isn’t theft then I guess we can stop worrying about open source licensing. Anyone, including corporations, would be able to take open source code and copy it into their own products, reselling it without consent or releasing their changes because they haven’t stolen anything, just copied it, right?
If you spend years of your life writing some software and then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake, anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying isn’t theft, theft they haven’t stolen anything from you, so you have nothing to complain about?
"they haven’t stolen anything from you" correct by the legal definition as my non lawyer brain reads it. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft
"so you have nothing to complain about" incorrect. Copyright infringement is it's own crime with it's own penalities.
The terminology section of this Wikipedia article is quite informative on why copying is not theft according to the US Supreme Court.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
A big difference in theft vs copyright infringement is if you go to jail or not (criminal vs civil). Again, not a lawyer.
Yes this would be one of many consequences of a world where copyright was actually killed or seriously ganked.
Good. Bacteria have the right idea about plasmid-swapping. Information is meant to be collective.
Of course, if you give people fewer incentives to share their information they can and often will simply keep it private. You can't copy information that people never gave to you, regardless of the law.
Make industrial espionage legally forgivable, but only if it is shared to the public.
I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.
It isn't sarcastic. Copyleft depends on copyright law.
Copyright infringement isn't theft. It's illegal, but it's not theft.
It does not qualify as the legal offence of "theft" in many courtrooms. It may be theft in colloquial English.
A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen. When I steal your car, phone, bike or milk, you no longer have it, and no longer enjoy the benefit of it. I'm fairly certain that's the part of theft most people have a problem with. If I zap your car and produce a perfect duplicate, and drive that duplicate away, leaving your car as if nothing had ever happened, other than minutiae like the VINs and licence plates being identical, I cannot imagine anyone having a problem with that. Nobody is going to call that theft. If you still believe that's theft, then I cannot understand where you're coming from.
This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi, the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking that copy.
It's not worth the effort. Anyone pretending not to understand the distinction is being deliberately obtuse.
I should really be able to recognise that by now. This is exactly the kind of discussion that has burned me out on using certain platforms before.
Thanks for putting it in plain text.
Nah, the people who pretend that definitions in a criminal law book override natural linguistics are being deliberately obtuse. Language exists mostly outside of a courtroom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XT-l-_3y0
This wild misrepresentation of the argument proves my point.
> A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having whatever is stolen.
No, colloquial English doesn't require this. e.g. "Identity theft"
Given that identity fraud leads directly into what is functionally actual theft (taking money out of you bank account or taking up loans in your name and scarpering), there's no wonder the term's confused. Doesn't make it theft though.
It isn't legally theft, but because people commonly use the word that way, it is colloquially theft. The qualifications are different. Legal crimes are defined by law. English is defined by its common use. They're not necessarily the same thing.
Just as many wiki's are called Wikipedias, by analogy with the biggest ones; that is, they aren't. Or maybe more fitting here, the word 'download', which can mean data transfer or modification in pretty much any way with a person not knowledgeable about computers.[1] Those uses aren't uncommon, but they are nevertheless wrong.
I think you just finished a circle there, so I don't think there's much reason to continue this line of enquiry, given neither of us is going to change our stance.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/download#Verb
Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value, but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because something of value is gone.
Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two entirely different things.
> Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is theft
No, it's not. You (or random large media corps) do not get to unilaterally redefine words of the English language like that.
Pass whatever laws you want about it, enforce them however you feel is appropriate, but don't try to redefine language itself to push your agenda.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/theft
"IP theft" is not counter to that definition. Intellectual property is a 'something'. That definition, does not require depriving someone else of something. As another valid example, see "identity theft".
Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the users of English absolutely do get to redefine language. That's how all modern English words originated.
And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary, because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or not you agree with the concept politically.
"IP theft" is a contradiction.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intellectual_property https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft
Between these two pages, you should be able to understand why "ip theft" is a bogus term. It's specifically called out in the intellectual property article.
"Unlike other forms of property, intellectual property can be used by infinitely many people without depriving the original owner of the use of their property."
Whereas theft has this definition: "Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property."
My not-a-lawyer understanding is that we use a common law system in the USA. This means that the definitions for things are based on history, previous cases, and the statutes that have been codified into law. This is a good thing because redefining words can make previously legal actions become illegal. Allowing that to happen at the pace slang develops in the modern era means we will hold people to different standards based on how "hip" they are.
In a court of law, yes. In colloquial English (as cited in the general English-language dictionary above), no, the use is much more broad.
I said you don’t get to redefine what words mean unilaterally. I disagree that enough English speakers agree with the MPA definition for us to adopt it. I sure don’t.
> Intellectual property is a 'something'.
Good thing I don't recognise the existence of that. We live in a society that does, and I despise that. At least the EU has the sense to not recognise software patents, so 'intellectual property' is not all-encompassing. Maybe one day they can loosen the grip further.
> As another valid example, see "identity theft".
'Identity fraud' is a much better term for what this is. Someone using my name, phone number and my mother's maiden name to get money in my name is not stealing my name and phone number; it's just fraud. It's much closer to lying than stealing.
English is how people use English words. You can not like it, but that is simply your opinion.
Never said it was anything but.
English is not a programming language. You're only disagreeing with my articulation here, which is irrelevant in relation to the thing of the matter - namely what I mean rather than what I type into the keyboard physically.
Ways to prevent someone from extracting value out of their work that are clearly not theft:
- murder
- kidnapping
- ddosing their site so they can't sell things
- carpet bombing their reviews with 1 star
- filing an injunction blocking the sale of their product on bogus ip claims (aka copyright trolling)
- gaslighting them to the point where they think the idea is worthless
- being the owner of IP that prevents them from selling their IP
Probably others but I think that's enough to show your definition is wrong.
All theft is preventing people from getting value out of their work, but not all preventing people from getting value out of their work is theft.
I'm not trying to make a definition, just trying to convey my opinion. I suggest we discuss our opinions rather than trying to codify English
Down the rabbit hole we go.
Found the villain.
Really? Have you read this post at all?
This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users. This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
Previously: https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-sentenced-to...
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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-sex...
I don't know the details about this specific case, but to me "violent rapists barely get 3 years" is the crazy side. YMMV.
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.
Your link does not back up your claim.
> refund
ah, it's this kind of pirate streaming
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.
Or you could use an adblocker.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Idk if I'm paying anyway, why not the legal way?
Because "legal" way is paved with obstacles.
Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc. All for $19.99.
In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything, anywhere, anytime.
Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed friction between me and my music.
Exactly.
Netflix is even starting to have problems with Apple's iCloud Private Relay with me, I already had to get in touch with their support.
We live in a world where paid services require us to deactivate security/privacy features to use them. Fuck them.
No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra privileges), one application for everything, runs everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which the first parties don't provide.
(Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series) refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out what the hell was happening.
I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports streaming websites, you often get a better user experience and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to jump between apps.
I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to legally watch every premier league game last season...
Sky Sports - £35/month
TNT Sports - £32/month
Amazon Prime - £9/month
And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot with about a third of the weekends games.
v.s. Paying someone on discord £8/month for all the games
Amazon Prime introduced ads. The ads will dissapear for some extra money. It made me instantly hate it.
Similarly, if you wanted to watch every single NFL game:
NFL Sunday Ticket ($150-204/season) - Out-of-market Sunday afternoon games
Amazon Prime Video ($9/month) - Thursday Night Football
Peacock Premium ($10.99/month) - Some exclusive games on NBC
ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month) - Monday Night Football on ESPN/ABC
Fox One ($19.99/month) - Fox Sunday games
Paramount+ ($7.99/month) - CBS Sunday games
Netflix - Two Christmas Day games
I'm sure Sky is a lot more than £35, is that number just for the Sports package on top of the basic sub?
p.s. great username
Yes - that's for Sky Sports.
You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer, but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no longer have the ability to time shift by having the main box record directly off the satellite feed.
You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite service.
IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
Especially for someone who only cares about their team, watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even more so if your local offer is burdened with bad commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that problem up to someone who watches a few different sports, but none are available as one single package, and the value for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as well, being you're now divided between several services. Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given they are functionally being punished for doing so.
Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the service is good, and you get everything under the sun, moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling shitty packages for students.
- The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a minimum, so people only needing one single class was still paying for 3.
- They would push high distance learning for anything they legally could, showing the same video of the same teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors" a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if not putting Masters students to do it for half the minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 + server costs. What a business.
- Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they would consolidate classes with another group and half would have to go to the other side of town for the one class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their tuition by one year.
But yeah, sure it makes more money.
When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's what happens.
I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff that I paid for:
Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my computer.
If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the license, just for the stability alone.
For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not deal with things that magically stop working from time to time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
Much cheaper and no blackouts. HeheStreams was $100/year for NBA/NHL/NFL/MLB, the NBA's equivalent was $200/year in 2021.
I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play in high definition because they didn't like the device I was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
Because netflix has decided my netflix 4k account shouldn't stream anything higher than 1080p in chrome.
The big draw here was bypassing geoblocking that you couldn’t otherwise buy your way out of legally.
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont have to deal with re-authentication just because you decided to watch it at a different location.
There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject customers to.
Can't play in HD because I don't use Windows or OSX. At the torrent store, I can play back any resolution I want.
> deal with the hellish ads
psst, kid
have you ever heard of adblocker?
Many pirate streaming sites don't work with adblockers.
The Admiral pop-up usually shows up on pirate sites.
It started as a proof of concept and graduated to a free site, and eventually I put a paywall up to see if anyone would be willing to pay. Internally, I hoped nobody would—I wanted to have a social life and not be beholden to old men telling me their ghetto streaming site was broken—and I expected nobody would.
The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's worth" model, and after watching the value that others were willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately charge.
You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low quality stream.
Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than cash.
I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and you'll hit something relevant very quickly
From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the event.
Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally. It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
One of these was to actually download a torrent and use torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it ngl
You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found, it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for next time.
The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual TV™, which I haven't watched in years, they only recently got onto the local streaming services. They should still be on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
TFA says they were pirating live sports streams - live content can't be accessed via torrent trackers, obviously.
I personally don't "get" sports, but I understand that people who do, want it to be a shared experience where everyone is watching the same game and feeling the same emotions at the same time. Even ten seconds of extra latency is bad because you can hear your neighbours cheering before you see the goal get scored, and if you were to download and watch the game 12 hours later, the "magic of the moment" would be gone - might as well just google what the final score was.
This comment was rate-limited.
> You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience
definitely not my experience
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
1. Schilling was the MLB pitcher, the word you’re looking for is “shilling”
2. Paying commenters to spread positive buzz is worse. The term for that is astroturfing
3. Scumbag
> noreply@ is absolutely stupid.
the reason noreply addresses exist is to avoid endless autoreply loops caused by poorly programmed mail software
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.
How did you get your reading material? Was it the facility library, or just all ordered and mailed in?
> 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)
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.
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.
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
I replied to another comment about further context: 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.
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...
> 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.
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