It's absolutely insane how many of these incredibly important torrent sites are just managed and hosted by a rag-tag group of people with the site barely clinging to life.
Basically all of an actual software company is bullshit jobs unrelated to the core product like legal, marketing, investor relations, HR, maybe even developers for R&D etc.
Running a website doesn't require that many people.
I've worked at companies with 4 developers and 30+ "other stuff". The company would not be profitable and we would not get paid without them, but the actual product would work just fine if we wanted it to.
Legal is very useful in the general case, but if you're an anonymous torrent site operator who fully intends to ignore the law anyway it's a waste of time.
If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth.
Growth may be making the product better, creating new product lines, or improving the scalability - for example, allowing larger numbers of users or entries. However, you can make the choice to make a well constrained product that serves a valuable use but doesn't need growth. Consider Bingo Card Creator, for example.
> If you build a system for resilience, it should not take significant effort to maintain. You should be able to keep the lights on with 10-20% of the engineering team. The rest is growth.
After 10+ years you always see the operational demand increase because of all the necessary edge conditions you build up (backcompat and whatever else).
Does the cost of change increase, or the cost of maintenance, or the cost of keeping it on?
Yes, the cost of change by definition increases with the complexity. I don't think that is in contention. Why is it changing for any other reason that you're growing (or trying to stave off decline?) For internal tools, change may be a function of external business pressures (like a supplier going out of business, requiring changes in an internal tool), but that is asking for new software.
As you add libraries, the cost of maintenance increases because the surface area of security increases. However, short of major changes (React, Rails, Etc), this feels like it's not moving outside the 10-20% range.
If you're running a community funded website, you don't need any of this overhead. In the 90's, pretty much the entire internet ran without these jobs.
Sure, they're necessary if you have an actual company, but the point is that you can run a website without a company.
It's quite unbelievable that the reason was they could not meet the costs of running it, while not being able to collect donations or help raise funds to keep the lights on. Technically the ownership and administration of their servers could have been distributed all across the world, which would have helped with the staff availability to a good extent.
KickAssTorrents made millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. I doubt their decision to start Rarbg was charitable or even ideologically driven. They probably just want out now. Lower margins may have been a part of that.
Marx always preached that the way to go is for the working class to become owners of the means of production. The only logical way to achieve exactly this is to participate in the stock market and own company shares.
I still don't understand how the communists managed to convince people that Marx saw things exactly in the opposite way.
Even now, you hear left leaning parties telling that "stocks are evil, one can lose complete retirements on the stock market" and in the same time "rich are rich because they earned everything in the stock market".
> "stocks are evil, one can lose complete retirements on the stock market"
Putting retirement money into "balanced portfolio" of stocks also destroys competition and pits corporations against their employees in a fight to get them more money after they retire minus the profits of the bookkeepers or how are those managers called.
> "rich are rich because they earned everything in the stock market"
Insider trading. :] And also just buying index funds, with the save issue as above.
I'm not surprised that a haphazardly organized group of people /can/ run a site like rarbg. It's just interesting how volatile (this isn't the right word but I'm not sure what is) the operations of these sites tend to be in light of the fact that the sites hold a lot of cultural value. RARBG was incredibly popular and was an important resource for torrenting. It's rare to see sites of that size and importance run in that way these days.
Radical notion these days. Everybody has an ulterior motive, probably one you find offensive, and you have to read between the lines and make uncharitable assumptions about their motives to find them out.
While we like to romanticize these groups, they often have ulterior motives in getting users to the site. Pushing ads from less-than-reputable ad-sources, and having a section with binaries where admins can push malware laden programs/games/files to increase the size of a client's botnet.
The model is that as users become more comfortable on the site, they eventually browse to the more dangerous categories and download programs/games/cracks/etc...
I wrote a blog post about a deep dive I did on one site, and showed that the admins were seeding malware in program downloads.
Suffice to say, when I reported the admins, other admins banned my account on the site and IP blocked me.
I actually ended up taking the blog post down because they started attacking my domain, and even Google blacklisted my domain because I had snippets of the malware code posted (I guess I should have used images instead of code). I was younger and just tinkering with security research anyway.
I don't think RARBG ever had ads, and they always filtered out anything malicious or low quality. Your description applies generally, but is the complete opposite of what RARBG was.
