alt Hacker NewsI never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time?
As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.
Replies
cube00 • today at 4:46 PM
If they're no longer using that model they may not be willing to continue using their storage for it.
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debugnik • today at 6:32 PM
You can add an existing HTTP download as a "web seed" to a torrent, so they don't actually need to do anything for people to share it as a torrent.
Every change to the source is effectively a new torrent. This creates a ton of fragmentation as data is reorganized, remixed, reencoded, and so on.
You can see this with many Linux distros: there is no single Debian torrent that people seed for years because there's always a refreshed version.
Distros are a bad use case for P2P anyway since you depend on upstream as soon as you start upgrading and installing packages.