That kind of magic just happens in cycles. We learn what was broken about the last thing and build a better one.

But that's not what has happened. The internet hasn't progressed as much as it has calcified into a couple of monolithic walled gardens. Remember when it was a wild west of creativity and everyone had their own website with painstakingly designed sprites and css? Yeah, scrolling through an instagram is so much more fulfilling. /s

The internet is boring and shitty now.

Folks felt much the same in the CompuServe, AOL and MSN days where the aforementioned big wigs had a complete monopoly on what most people saw online.

In fact during the 90s it really felt like there was no technological future possible beyond what Microsoft saw fit. They would literally buy out, copy and crush every upstart who had even moderate success in the technology sector.

Never know where the future will take us, or indeed where we (techies) will take it. For all we know the next what.cd might be something far beyond its current incarnation (a distributed Spotify + Slack/IRC on steroids - anyone's guess!)

Just like What was that much better Oink, I can't begin to imagine how awesome the next one will be.

Next one? There are already tons of alternatives, but I do fear that Spotify, Tidal, Apple, and Amazon will eat much of the demand for this in the future.

Said magic was a blatant violation of copyright law and gleeful disregard of common decency. You should be happy that the Internet is finally growing up and becoming part of real life. This would never happen as long as we allow and champion unlawful websites, or allow toxic discussion.

Your comment puzzles me - as others have repeated, what.cd was a fantastic archive of music that no current museum or library has come close to achieving. This community performed preservation and organization of art and culture (and many rare works) on a huge scale. How can you perform the mental gymnastics to call that a "gleeful disregard of common decency"? If anything, the destruction of that effort is what is so "indecent".

It is obviously unfortunate that the collection was illegal, but this seems clearly to be a situation where copyright law has run counter to the interests of civilization as a whole. Preservation should always trump licensing - licenses will expire, music will be passed from generation to generation.

I do not understand the philosophy behind your comment. I think there's a lot of things unsaid in such a deceptively simple three sentence post and I'm not sure if I'd even like to ask you to elaborate to ascertain what lies behind your thinking. However in the spirit of open discussion: why?