Re:What Reddit Got Wrong
by SoftTalker on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @03:00PM
(#36330885)
Hm. FTP servers are pretty easy. "ls" to see files. "get" to get them. What wasn't easy was finding them, and then preventing them falling over when too many people tried to access them at the same time. Napster solved that with distributed file serving and consolidated listings of what was available.
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Even easier if you used a nice client to access ftp. The notion that Napster was easier than FTP doesn't ring true to me, either.
napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.
> You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from
True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.
> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything
I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.
> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?
Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.
Apparently I'm mis-remembering Scour, but Audiogalaxy was definitely just a FTP site index. FTP isn't hard to use, but finding the files you were looking for and downloading them via FTP servers were definitely more difficult pre-napster. There weren't many that were just open, you'd have to upload content to be able to download something else. A lot of them were 10-1 ratios, or people were looking for specific things to trade.
Re:What Reddit Got Wrong
by giantrobot on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @06:23PM
(#36333616)
FTP servers were easy...except for actually finding content on them where Napster was better. You literally described why Napster was better. FTP was only concerned with moving bytes. Napster added a search functionality on top of the moving bytes which is the thing most people actually wanted. Napster could have just been a fancy Archie front end and it would have been just about as popular.