<story><title>Shutting down my legal torrent site after 17 years</title><url>https://www.legittorrents.info/</url><text>I ran Legit Torrents for ~17 years and shut it down recently. The homepage is now a nostalgic look back at that time.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>phpisthebest</author><text>The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments,  not the lack of competition in Ads.&lt;p&gt;The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.</text></item><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it&amp;#x27;s time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we&amp;#x27;re just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make&amp;#x2F;play video games. But we&amp;#x27;re the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.&lt;p&gt;Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There&amp;#x27;s a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it&amp;#x27;s a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can&amp;#x27;t remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO&amp;#x27;d that I can&amp;#x27;t find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that&amp;#x27;s just not possible?</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>This is wonderful sage advice:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there&amp;#x27;s often no remaining options if you lose adsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arcticbull</author><text>The problem is nobody wants to make a hundred purchasing decisions per day. Which is why micropayments aren&amp;#x27;t a thing despite us having had the infrastructure for decades. There&amp;#x27;s no reason PayPal can&amp;#x27;t support sub-dollar transactions now, or ever before.&lt;p&gt;Nick Szabo and I disagree on probably everything else in this world, but we agree on micropayments. Nick&amp;#x27;s paper is worth a read and does a great job of explaining the issues [1].&lt;p&gt;tl;dr: around micropayments is that in reality users&amp;#x2F;customers don&amp;#x27;t actually want them. They run afoul of our fundamental human behavioral costing model.&lt;p&gt;The reason ad-supported is so prevalent isn&amp;#x27;t because it&amp;#x27;s being forced on us by a shady cabal or anything, it&amp;#x27;s just the least-worst option we&amp;#x27;ve compromised on.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nakamotoinstitute.org&amp;#x2F;static&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;micropayments-and-mental-transaction-costs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;nakamotoinstitute.org&amp;#x2F;static&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;micropayments-and-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Shutting down my legal torrent site after 17 years</title><url>https://www.legittorrents.info/</url><text>I ran Legit Torrents for ~17 years and shut it down recently. The homepage is now a nostalgic look back at that time.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>phpisthebest</author><text>The biggest injustice or problem with the web is lack of viable micropayments,  not the lack of competition in Ads.&lt;p&gt;The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.</text></item><item><author>zackmorris</author><text>The fact that there is no recourse or viable competition, strikes me as an injustice. Maybe the biggest injustice on the web currently.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it&amp;#x27;s time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we&amp;#x27;re just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make&amp;#x2F;play video games. But we&amp;#x27;re the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.&lt;p&gt;Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There&amp;#x27;s a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it&amp;#x27;s a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can&amp;#x27;t remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO&amp;#x27;d that I can&amp;#x27;t find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that&amp;#x27;s just not possible?</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>This is wonderful sage advice:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Be &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there&amp;#x27;s often no remaining options if you lose adsense.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ComodoHacker</author><text>If I remember correctly from reading those who tried, the problem with &amp;#x27;viable micropayments&amp;#x27; is compliance. If you cut on it and make transactions cheap, your service will be heavily abused for fraud and laundering. Preventing that makes transactions cost nearly as much as traditional card payments, thus not viable.</text></comment>