<story><title>Retiring Tucows Downloads</title><url>https://tucows.com/retired/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>renewiltord</author><text>They were such shit though, with the fake download buttons and everything.</text></item><item><author>soheil</author><text>tucows and download.com were the &amp;quot;app stores&amp;quot; of the web before the walled gardens of the big companies today. You could distribute your app to one of these sites and have it be automatically syndicated to thousands of other download sites. This is how distributed web worked. We&amp;#x27;re making the web more centralized and it&amp;#x27;s not just social media and youtube.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cogman10</author><text>Those didn&amp;#x27;t come till they started pumping the site with banners.  From there, malware assholes figured out they could advertise with a duplicate &amp;quot;download&amp;quot; button and get a healthy number of clicks (certainly got me more than once).&lt;p&gt;They went to shit, but didn&amp;#x27;t start out that way until they started to try and fund their site through a shit ton of ads.&lt;p&gt;That was a dark day for the internet.  Thank goodness for ad blockers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Retiring Tucows Downloads</title><url>https://tucows.com/retired/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>renewiltord</author><text>They were such shit though, with the fake download buttons and everything.</text></item><item><author>soheil</author><text>tucows and download.com were the &amp;quot;app stores&amp;quot; of the web before the walled gardens of the big companies today. You could distribute your app to one of these sites and have it be automatically syndicated to thousands of other download sites. This is how distributed web worked. We&amp;#x27;re making the web more centralized and it&amp;#x27;s not just social media and youtube.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yosito</author><text>I remember a Tucows before the fake download button. But as a kid I definitely downloaded a virus or two on my parent&amp;#x27;s computer.</text></comment>