I remember being on a decent wired connection, working late in the office in London. All of a sudden, I got a call from the IT manager for Europe, who wanted my help to figure out which device was performing a DDoS or was part of a botnet. He had received alerts about the number of connections and the bandwidth.

After a few minutes, I realised he was talking about my laptop. I presume I had been promoted to a supernode thanks to my location and bandwidth. This was around 2009.

Part of the reason for the switch was more and more users on mobile devices, so the proportion of users that could act as supernodes got much smaller. I think I remember one of the Skype developers describing this in a comment on HN, but I can't find it now.

> they received money from the government to do it

Got a source for this? Not that I find it hard to believe.

I can't find it right now, but there's a bit of information regarding the NSA and MS here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/11/skype-ten...

The Skype client of today is just a renamed Lync client, which actually used to be decent. They've done nothing but make it worse since Lync ceased to exist.

That's Skype for Business, which is completely different from Skype, and has now been deprecated in favour of Teams. Teams is again completely different from the Skypes, and is more of a Slack clone.