[HN Gopher] Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site
___________________________________________________________________
Lessons from Growing a Piracy Streaming Site
Author : zuhayeer
Score : 250 points
Date : 2025-11-07 07:09 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prison.josh.mn)
(TXT) w3m dump (prison.josh.mn)
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Previously: https://torrentfreak.com/hehestreams-iptv-admin-
| sentenced-to...
| gethly wrote:
| > Specifically, in multiple communications with MLB employees,
| STREIT claimed that he knew MLB reporters who were 'interested
| in the story,' and stated that it would be bad if the
| vulnerability were exposed and MLB was embarrassed.
|
| Oh man, such a stupid thing to do. This turned a $150k bounty
| into extortion.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| > Streit indicated his work was worth $150K but was also
| informed there was no 'bug bounty' program at the baseball
| league.
|
| Sounds like a bug that would have been better off anonymously
| leaked for the other IPTV providers to pick up, after said
| bug was valued at 0 in greyhat dollars.
| gethly wrote:
| That is not what it says. They only said they had no bounty
| program to attract people to try and find bugs. That does
| not mean companies are not willing to compensate you if you
| find and report a bug in their system. I think 150k was
| well worth it, but the guy just worded it in the worst
| possible way.
| joshmn wrote:
| The bug couldn't have had less to do with streaming, and in
| the wrong hands would have been worth a significant amount
| of money--exponentially more than what the Shopify CVE
| calculator spit out and I replied with at the time. There's
| more here: https://prison.josh.mn/charges
|
| There's a lot of nuance, and what was ultimately reported
| about the bug isn't how things played out--there's tons of
| context missing. I won't talk more of the bug, or the
| handling of situation. I realize it was the leading
| headline (more so than the "guy had streaming website") but
| it was, in my opinion, also the most far-fetched.
| GardenLetter27 wrote:
| The US sentences seem really crazy coming from Europe - like
| even violent rapists barely get 3 years here:
| https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sentence-increased-in-sex...
| raincole wrote:
| I don't know the details about this specific case, but to me
| "violent rapists barely get 3 years" is the crazy side. YMMV.
| viridian wrote:
| The US is a major outlier in sentencing for violent crimes
| and sex crimes. It's not the absolute peak in terms of
| sentencing, but its somewhere between the Latin American
| mean and the Middle Eastern mean, which is unexpected given
| its other human development indicators.
| crtasm wrote:
| Your link does not back up your claim.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > refund
|
| ah, it's _this_ kind of pirate streaming
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| The vast majority of pirate stream sites are monetized in some
| way. If I was going to use one I'd probably prefer to pay some
| small amount rather than deal with the hellish ads the 'free'
| ones use.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Or you could use an adblocker.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| A lot of the pirate stream sites I've run into break
| entirely if you have an adblocker enabled. I'd guess it's a
| combination of filter lists not being tested on them along
| with much more aggressive ads (from sketchier ad networks).
| pferde wrote:
| Use a _good_ adblocker. I 'd never do anything illegal,
| of course, but a friend of my friend has been
| successfully using all sorts of pirated content sites for
| years, and swears he barely sees any ads.
|
| Or, you know, don't. The less popular these sites are,
| the longer they stay around.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| At the time I'm quite certain I was using uBlock Origin
| pre-MV3. I don't think I also had my DNS-based adblocker
| yet, though.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Maybe I'm not using enough of them, because I've never
| had issues with uBo. Or it's because I use 3rd party
| script blocking.
| ngruhn wrote:
| Idk if I'm paying anyway, why not the legal way?
| timpera wrote:
| I'm personally not into piracy, but with paid pirate sports
| streaming websites, you often get a better user experience
| and way more choice for cheaper than with the legal
| options. You only need to pay once and you don't need to
| jump between apps.
| MallocVoidstar wrote:
| Much cheaper and no blackouts. HeheStreams was $100/year
| for NBA/NHL/NFL/MLB, the NBA's equivalent was $200/year in
| 2021.
| aaaaaaron wrote:
| No DRM issues (like same quality on every device, no extra
| privileges), one application for everything, runs
| everywhere, no UX issues (e.g., long scrolling to continue
| watching series, no autoplay and no spoilers in the
| thumbnail). It's worth paying for such an experience, which
| the first parties don't provide.
|
| (Speaking in general here, this includes Jellyfin.)
| freedomben wrote:
| DRM issues are why I cancelled and won't renew
| Paramount+. Their damn Google TV app running on a
| completely stock/factory Chromecast w/ Google TV, plugged
| in via HDMI to an unmodified TV, frequently (always on
| the same shows, especially newer Star Trek series)
| refuses to recognize the validity of my setup and reverts
| to an incredibly annoying color tint rotation that cycles
| between extremes. It took me quite a while to figure out
| what the hell was happening.
| Telaneo wrote:
| IPTV in Western Europe is becoming more popular because
| it's decently priced for what you get. Say you want to
| watch football, but don't give a shit about anything else
| sports related. Well, you're probably still paying for
| everything else in a giant package for 50-100+ USD a month.
|
| Especially for someone who only cares about their team,
| watching two games a month, that's a really bad deal. Even
| more so if your local offer is burdened with bad
| commentators or ads you can't get away from. Scale that
| problem up to someone who watches a few different sports,
| but none are available as one single package, and the value
| for money gets worse, while the experience grows worse as
| well, being you're now divided between several services.
| Add in DRM and bad app experiences, and you get people who
| just can't be arsed to do things properly any more, given
| they are functionally being punished for doing so.
|
| Or you could pay a shady guy a few quid a month, but the
| service is good, and you get everything under the sun,
| moon, sky, and maybe even the stars. Can't blame them for
| wanting an experience that isn't trying to wring them dry.
| whstl wrote:
| It's so funny how much that reminds me of working in a
| university acquired by a large for-profit corporation.
|
| After the MBAs arrived, the whole thing was about selling
| shitty packages for students.
|
| - The college was somehow legally allowed to charge a
| minimum, so people only needing one single class was
| still paying for 3.
|
| - They would push high distance learning for anything
| they legally could, showing the same video of the same
| teacher to all their 10 universities and paying "tutors"
| a minimum wage to moderate hundreds of Moodle classes (if
| not putting Masters students to do it for half the
| minimum wage). So 80 students paying $1000 on average to
| take a 5 class, and some of those cost on average $2000 +
| server costs. What a business.
|
| - Of course classes that had 10 people in it suddenly had
| 40. And for when there wasn't 40 people to attend, they
| would consolidate classes with another group and half
| would have to go to the other side of town for the one
| class that, if they didn't attend, would set back their
| tuition by one year.
|
| But yeah, sure it makes more money.
|
| When you don't even have to compete on quality, that's
| what happens.
| moussasissoko wrote:
| I don't condone it but if you're in the UK and you want to
| legally watch every premier league game last season...
|
| Sky Sports - PS35/month
|
| TNT Sports - PS32/month
|
| Amazon Prime - PS9/month
|
| And then in the UK there is a legal peculiarity whereby 3pm
| Saturday games are illegal to broadcast on television, so
| you don't even get that slot. It's the most common slot
| with about a third of the weekends games.
|
| v.s. Paying someone on discord PS8/month for all the games
| walthamstow wrote:
| I'm sure Sky is a lot more than PS35, is that number just
| for the Sports package on top of the basic sub?
|
| p.s. great username
| philjohn wrote:
| Yes - that's for Sky Sports.
|
| You can often get a deal if you threaten to cancel, go
| through with it, and then wait for a retentions offer,
| but since Sky was acquired by Comcast that's happening
| less and less, especially for the superior Sky Q
| satellite service - you can get great deals on their Sky
| Stream service, but it's plagued with issues, and you no
| longer have the ability to time shift by having the main
| box record directly off the satellite feed.
|
| You also can't skip ads unless you pay them, versus the
| ability to pause, fast forward etc. on the Satellite
| service.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Amazon Prime introduced ads. The ads will dissapear for
| some extra money. It made me instantly hate it.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Similarly, if you wanted to watch every single NFL game:
|
| NFL Sunday Ticket ($150-204/season) - Out-of-market
| Sunday afternoon games
|
| Amazon Prime Video ($9/month) - Thursday Night Football
|
| Peacock Premium ($10.99/month) - Some exclusive games on
| NBC
|
| ESPN Unlimited ($29.99/month) - Monday Night Football on
| ESPN/ABC
|
| Fox One ($19.99/month) - Fox Sunday games
|
| Paramount+ ($7.99/month) - CBS Sunday games
|
| Netflix - Two Christmas Day games
| happymellon wrote:
| One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that you dont
| have to deal with re-authentication just because you
| decided to watch it at a different location.
|
| There are many small papercuts that legal providers subject
| customers to.
| tjpnz wrote:
| I rented a movie recently on Amazon and it refused to play
| in high definition because they didn't like the device I
| was streaming it to. Bullshit like that.
| joshmn wrote:
| The big draw here was bypassing geoblocking that you
| couldn't otherwise buy your way out of legally.
| egorfine wrote:
| Because "legal" way is paved with obstacles.
|
| Geofencing (you can't watch this sport from this location
| because fuck you), devices blacklisting (you can't watch
| this sport on your mobile device because fuck you), rights
| expiring (you can't watch this match anymore despite you
| have "bought" it because fuck you), screen limiting (you
| are logged in on both your TV and iphone so fuck you), etc.
| All for $19.99.
|
| In contrast, you pay like $9.99 and you can watch anything,
| anywhere, anytime.
|
| Remember when music piracy died? When Steve Jobs removed
| friction between me and my music.
| whstl wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Netflix is even starting to have problems with Apple's
| iCloud Private Relay with me, I already had to get in
| touch with their support.
|
| We live in a world where paid services require us to
| deactivate security/privacy features to use them. Fuck
| them.
| whstl wrote:
| I don't have cable or IPTV, but I do pirate other stuff
| that I paid for:
|
| Anything that has intrusive DRM has no place in my
| computer.
|
| If it's for work, I will still pirate while holding the
| license, just for the stability alone.
|
| For music stuff stability is paramount and I'd rather not
| deal with things that magically stop working from time to
| time (IK Multimedia is notorious for that).
| encom wrote:
| Can't play in HD because I don't use Windows or OSX. At the
| torrent store, I can play back any resolution I want.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Because netflix has decided my netflix 4k account shouldn't
| stream anything higher than 1080p in chrome.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > deal with the hellish ads
|
| psst, kid
|
| have you ever heard of _adblocker_?
| gorbachev wrote:
| Many pirate streaming sites don't work with adblockers.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| The Admiral pop-up usually shows up on pirate sites.
| matips wrote:
| You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience. You have to
| pay in your resources (private torrent trackers) or in cash
| (derbit, usenet). Alternatively you use unstable and low
| quality stream.
|
| Because of philosophy I prefer sharing resources more than
| cash.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I never paid a cent and always found what I looked for, just
| type whatever you're looking for + "torrent" on yandex and
| you'll hit something relevant very quickly
| saaaaaam wrote:
| From what he says in the post I think this guy was selling
| pirated livestreams of sports - something that people want
| to watch as it is happening, not as a torrent after the
| event.
| whynotmakealt wrote:
| Stremio + torrentio for me is a very good setup personally.
| It just works but I know of other mechanisms too.
|
| One of these was to actually download a torrent and use
| torrentfs or something similar and you can stream a video
| directly from the mirror without downloading it fully and
| on linux, I really appreciate its simplicity and I love it
| ngl
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| > You always pay for piracy or it is bad experience
|
| definitely not my experience
| Telaneo wrote:
| You have to go pretty far out there to find shows and movies
| that aren't on public trackers. I definitely can find gaps if
| I go looking for them, especially if we start counting not
| finding a blu-ray rip while a DVD rip is easily found, or not
| finding a 4K rip but a 1080p one is out there, but for most
| anything friends would have asked me to dig up, a high
| quality rip is easily found. Not to mention that once found,
| it can just stay on a hard drive and be easily retrieved for
| next time.
|
| The only exception I can think of are local shows, but I
| don't watch them, specifically because they're only on Actual
| TV(tm), which I haven't watched in years, they only recently
| got onto the local streaming services. They should still be
| on local private trackers, which I can definitely agree is a
| hassle, but depending on how bad your local streaming service
| is, they can definitely a be a tempting prospect.
| immibis wrote:
| TFA says they were pirating live sports streams - live
| content can't be accessed via torrent trackers, obviously.
|
| I personally don't "get" sports, but I understand that
| people who do, want it to be a shared experience where
| everyone is watching the same game and feeling the same
| emotions at the same time. Even ten seconds of extra
| latency is bad because you can hear your neighbours
| cheering before you see the goal get scored, and if you
| were to download and watch the game 12 hours later, the
| "magic of the moment" would be gone - might as well just
| google what the final score was.
|
| This comment was rate-limited.
| joshmn wrote:
| It started as a proof of concept and graduated to a free site,
| and eventually I put a paywall up to see if anyone would be
| willing to pay. Internally, I hoped nobody would--I wanted to
| have a social life and not be beholden to old men telling me
| their ghetto streaming site was broken--and I expected nobody
| would.
|
| The first purchase was for $100 on a "pay what you think it's
| worth" model, and after watching the value that others were
| willing to pay, I had a good idea as to what I would ultimately
| charge.
| rikafurude21 wrote:
| These kind of pirated IPTV services are very popular in middle
| eastern countries. You message some guy on whatsapp, pay him a
| couple bucks and receive a link to an APK file + login info. The
| app gives you access to basically any channel in every country.
| They have to do everything through word of mouth because its high
| risk, obviously, and even in developed countries you can get sent
| to jail pretty quickly for running something like this. I was
| expecting esoteric OPSEC lessons from this post, because if thats
| not the highest priority, its pretty stupid to even consider
| doing this.
| JoeDohn wrote:
| it's the same thing in western Europe, piracy IPTV is a very
| popular thing since few years now, you get that through discord
| servers or really a simple query on aliexpress and you can buy
| a yearly account for 30$.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Have an example of a search term for non us content, or are
| they all worldwide with 1000s of channels?
|
| I want one for my MIL who speaks a different language.
| Telaneo wrote:
| The goto options that are commonly recommended locally to
| me both have 40k+ channels, and if that doesn't include
| damn near every TV channel in existence that's still
| running, I'd be surprised. I'd imagine the IPTV pirates
| have no reason to limit the number of channels they can
| give you access too, since more = better, while trimming it
| down is just more work for the pirates, and getting access
| to every channel in the world is apparently not very
| difficult.
|
| I'd imagine the situation is much the same in other places.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > and even in developed countries you can get sent to jail
| pretty quickly for running something like this
|
| This would _only_ happen in developed countries. Nowhere else
| in the world cares about foreign copyrights being infringed.
| mlrtime wrote:
| This seems like common sense, when you're not fully
| developed, you spend time caring on the bottom of the
| necessity triangle, not the top.
|
| MS knows this fairly well, and why they don't go after the
| low hanging pirates.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| in what we would consider "non-developed countries", the
| powers-that-be might not care about copyrights, but about
| getting their cut/bakshish. Particularly the "illegal" world
| doesn't take kind to outside "invaders" making money on
| someone else's turf.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It may not be the copyright they care about so much, but
| strict Muslim countries might find western shows criminally
| objectionable on moral grounds.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794455
|
| Go to any local market place and you will see ads to buy these
| streaming sticks with everything setup for you, plug and play.
| JohnLocke4 wrote:
| Good OPSEC is surprisingly simple and boring. Essentially, it
| just boils down to using tor and not accidentally exposing
| sensitive information, which is how Ross Ulbricht got caught.
| (okay, it is more than that but in essence it is true)
|
| There are probably many people in prison right now because tor
| is awfully slow. If you don't have the patience for tor you
| probably also don't have the patience for prison.
| pta2002 wrote:
| I found the whole site a very interesting (and fairly quick)
| read. I don't really have anything else to add, but I'm glad the
| owner manages to be honest and take good lessons from the whole
| thing.
|
| It's interesting to me how from his account, everyone is fairly
| sympathetic to him regarding his charges (he mentions his
| employer showing up to his interview in a sports jersey in
| reference to his charges!), and how he mentions he knows several
| actual sports players used his site. It really goes to show the
| state of modern streaming.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| It still amazes me that these kind of 'illegal business models'
| usually have a far better customer support than legal business
| models :)
| Telaneo wrote:
| The illegal bushiness apparently has incentives to keep their
| customers, while the legal ones rest on their legal monopoly-
| laurels.
|
| I'd imagine if we had a market where every service had access
| to every piece of content, so no exclusivity, this problem
| would go away. Then they'd compete on the quality of service
| rather than their selection of content they've held hostage.
| But as long as individual services can opt to not never share
| their content with anybody else, they can just hold their
| customers hostage, since they cannot get their good from
| anywhere else, so the only options are buy or don't buy.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| Shouldn't music streaming services be an example for a market
| where each service offers pretty much the same products and
| they compete on price and product alone.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Yes. Although there are some gaps, you have to go fairly
| far out there to find them. Most everything is on every
| music streaming platform. The music industry got that memo
| after MP3 piracy became rampant.
|
| But the video streaming platforms haven't gotten that memo
| yet and prefer to dig themselves into a larger and larger
| hole, both as far as normal Netflix style on-demand
| streaming, and IPTV style streams for sports and such.
| Hence why piracy of both are growing, with torrents on one
| side and IPTV pirate streams on the other.
| b3lvedere wrote:
| Not that the music business has had some very shady
| business in the past, but my guess is that the movie
| industry is even more shady. Didn't the Harry Potter
| movies make a gigantic loss on paper? Steve Jackson had
| to sue the company to get his Lord of The Rings money, if
| i'm not mistaken.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yup, "hollywood accounting" at its finest. It's
| exploitative AF - established actors and other key staff
| can demand percentage of gross revenue, everyone else
| gets either a fixed amount or, worse, net revenue
| percentage. But as there is always a fresh supply of new
| desperates, you either take what is offered or you go
| hungry.
|
| Even the big unions have failed to put an end to this
| unholy mess.
| paol wrote:
| They are, and that's exactly why music piracy fell off a
| cliff in the streaming era and movie/tv piracy didn't.
|
| "Piracy is a service problem" -- Gabe Newell
| b3lvedere wrote:
| If i'm not mistaken the people behind Spotify were also
| some of the people behind The Pirate Bay, so they may
| have had some seriously good insights on how to treat
| your customers.
| thatcat wrote:
| it was what.cd, which is how they got their original
| comprehensive catalog so fast
| lfam wrote:
| Citation?
| tmerc wrote:
| Not OP: https://gizmodo.com/early-spotify-was-built-on-
| pirated-mp3-f...
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The article said the Spotify CEO was CEO of uTorrent. And
| Spotify used files employees got from The Pirate Bay. Not
| what the HN comments claimed.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| The music streaming services are also the easiest way to
| pirate music.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I used to be a big digital music hoarder. I hate Spotify,
| YouTube is the thing that killed music downloading for
| me. It has pretty much everything worth listening to,
| it's free, AdBlock keeps it usable, and it has a great
| diversity of other content.
| gorbachev wrote:
| But they don't offer the same products. The UX and tools
| are largely the same, or similar enough, but the product is
| not the same. The product for streaming services is by and
| large the content catalog they offer.
|
| Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals with
| publishers and offer a completely different catalog of
| music/movies.
|
| This is why pirate sites are far superior, because they
| don't have those artificial limits on the product catalog
| offered.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| "Exclusive deals" in this context as analogous to
| "monopolistic deals", the former term sounds less bad,
| but in terms of consumer effect, "monopolistic" is a much
| more apt word to use.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Music catalogs are nearly identical identical. Much
| different from video streaming services where the
| divergence is dramatic from one to another.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Each streaming service has their own exclusive deals
| with publishers and offer a completely different catalog
| of music
|
| What? If a piece of music is on one streaming service,
| it's on all of them.
| brian626 wrote:
| That may be true for bigger artists on major labels, but
| for smaller independent bands it's not always the case. I
| am a heavy user and fan of Bandcamp for listening to and
| purchasing music but I use Spotify for listening in the
| car and sharing playlists. I often find albums that are
| only available on either Spotify or Bandcamp but not
| both.
|
| The ones that aren't available on Spotify tend to be
| self-released but otherwise there isn't much of a
| pattern. Albums not on Bandcamp, though, tend to be
| mediocre at best.
|
| And that's not even mentioning bands that are pulling
| their music from Spotify in protest...
| tmerc wrote:
| That's unfortunately not true.
|
| In the US, this song is unavailable on Spotify where I
| found it, but available on YT music. Preface by Man
| Without Country. Given another 5 minutes, I could also
| find a song that is not listed on one but available on
| another.
|
| https://music.you tube.com/watch?v=bvWjybBBFYs
| throawayonthe wrote:
| that's partly how music streaming is so cheap (or even free
| with ads)
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Not everyone uses every service equally, nor need the same
| from each service. "Listening to music" is a broad spectrum
| of activities in reality, and when I use streaming
| services, I almost exclusively use them for discovery and
| to find new music, and music I actually listen to more than
| once is bought rather than streamed. So while for me the
| single most important question for me is "How easy does
| this service make it for me to find new music?", for
| others, the question might be "What service streams the
| highest quality?". This is besides the whole legal thing
| with "What music is available there vs here" that others
| already mentioned.
| port11 wrote:
| Catalog differences aside, I think that's a nice market to
| analyse. Qobuz differentiates itself on audio quality,
| Apple on its integration with iOS, etc. I do think they
| ended up competing on price and product alone, except for
| little things.
|
| My GF's Spotify makes great playlists, but they deleted my
| account twice and I'd never go back. So in that sense I'm
| willing to pay extra for customer service, which many of
| them don't care for. That's an interesting differentiator.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 20 year long patents are a large factor for it, designed for
| a very different world where progress was extremely slow.
| It's borderline absurd to keep them going today, they can
| restrict the usage of a technology for more than the entire
| duration of its usefulness before it's superseded by
| something better, which is patented again, giving you a
| series of sequential monopolies instead of a competitive
| market. I'm glad that at least the Chinese dgaf about patents
| so there is still some competition in practice even if
| questionably legal.
| Telaneo wrote:
| The other large factor is copyright. If we had 21 year
| copyright terms for shows and movies, I'd imagine someone
| would have set up a streaming service with every show and
| movie under the sun that they could fit into that, and
| people would eat it up, since they often just want to half-
| watch Seinfield, Friends, Star Trek, et cetera, since its
| their comfort show. A service that can provide that without
| being hostile is quite a lot of what many people look for
| in a streaming service.
| billy99k wrote:
| What would be the incentive to pour millions of dollars into
| a product,only to have virtually no way to make money or get
| your investment back?
|
| What would stop much larger companies, with more resources,
| to just keep taking anything good from smaller
| companies/startup?
|
| This idea would last in the short-term, and once money dried
| up, result in a nonexistent market.
|
| Piracy sites are competing with other piracy sites and the
| only differing factor is support.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > This idea would last in the short-term, and once money
| dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
|
| Tell that to the music industry. That is not without its
| fault, but the products on offer are much better than the
| movie industry has. The market is smaller than it once was,
| i.e. there's less money flowing through the system, because
| the consumer isn't being squeezed from every side. The
| customer is being provided a better product for less money.
| That's a good thing in my opinion. Having the market be
| artificially inflated because everyone's got their own
| small realm no-one else is allowed to touch without paying
| a hefty licence fee is not a good thing in my opinion.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| I don't think "tell that to the music industry", an
| industry where it is notoriously near-impossible for the
| people who actually _create_ music to earn a living from
| their work without signing a deal with a tiny handful of
| record companies, is the ringing endorsement of "customer
| getting service for pennies is good actually" that you
| are portraying it as.
| Telaneo wrote:
| If you can't earn a living by creating music, then don't.
| If you can't earn a living by creating movies, then
| don't. If you can't make money writing books about the
| intricacies of Unix system calls, then don't. You aren't
| entitled to earn a living just because you create music,
| movies or writings in our current society. If we're going
| to have free market capitalism and not have UBI, then
| that's the way the cookie's gonna crumble. Some
| industries earn lots and are easy to make a living off
| of, and other are never going to earn you a penny. Over
| time, which one's are which start to change. It happened
| to music. I believe it will happen to movies too, and
| look forward to that day so the consumer can reap the
| benefit.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| Wonderful! Again I fail to see how this is supposedly a
| strong argument against this:
|
| > This idea would last in the short-term, and once money
| dried up, result in a nonexistent market.
| Telaneo wrote:
| The music market clearly still exists. There's no reason
| to believe that the movie market will cease to exist.
| nosianu wrote:
| Many years ago I spent two months in Odessa, Ukraine. I lived
| in a rented apartment not far from the pretty famous half open-
| air book (and CD/DVD) market
| (https://wanderlog.com/place/details/10511015/books-market).
|
| I purchased a cracked Adobe product DVD there _(Disclaimer: I
| actually had a license at the time, but didn 't have it
| installed on that particular laptop)_. I had trouble installing
| it, so I went back. I got my money back and help installing an
| alternative on my laptop. Best service!
|
| PS: Also, Odessa is _very_ beautiful, and I say that as someone
| who has lived in some beautiful places. --
| https://youtu.be/G-BkuEOFGKI (Odessa Walking Tour - Ukraine's
| Most Beautiful City in 4K -- and this is still missing the many
| wonderful inner courtyards, and the entire long wonderful beach
| and park, which would be another equally long video)
| egorfine wrote:
| Ukrainian here. Odessa is indeed a city on another level.
| Easily the best city in the country and incredibly nice in
| the summer. Glad you liked it! <3
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I heard "was". due to destruction from russian attacks.
| egorfine wrote:
| Well, summer or not, it's not really comfy to walk around
| a city during explosions happening right over your head.
| Been there, done that.
| Muromec wrote:
| Upvoting this as an Odessit.
| pwdisswordfishs wrote:
| > I actually had a license at the time, but didn't have it
| installed on that particular laptop
|
| That reminds me of the time I had moved to another city. I
| still had my old apartment but had brought most of my things
| and was more or less officially moved and moved-in. Of the
| stuff that I did still have at the old place was a lot of
| food (non-perishables, oil, eggs) because it had been better
| to leave it there for the time being instead of moving it all
| (because food). When I was back in my old city to take care
| of some business there and showed up to my old apartment in
| the late morning one Sunday, I decided to make a big brunch
| to use up a lot of the consumables. I needed a measuring cup,
| though, and I no longer had one there. (It happens that the
| one I did have at my new apartment was also cracked (in the
| physical sense) from moving, so it actually wouldn't have
| been any help, because even though I was going to fix it, I
| hadn't gotten around to it.)
|
| I went to the store and lifted one (same brand), since I knew
| I had once already paid for one once.
| nosianu wrote:
| Except I would have been allowed to install it on that
| laptop, I just didn't have the original media with me, and
| I also did not care.
|
| I also, again already having paid for the original license
| years before, got a cracked Warcraft III Russian edition
| (offline only, no BattleNet, obviously), so if you want to
| tell more stories to show what a bad person I am, here is
| one more to add.
|
| I did watch a lot of movies in my life that I never paid
| for though, so there is that. If they ever have one
| reasonable ad-free subscription that covers them all (also
| across borders, like Asian anime) I promise to sign up for
| that. Haven't watched anything at all in over a decade
| though, except for the occasional Twitch or Youtube. I
| don't even have a TV.
|
| I guess for some people making sure everybody follows _the
| rules_ is more important than anything else. I admit that I
| am the occasional rule breaker, including as a pedestrian
| crossing a red light when I feel stopping all traffic just
| for little me when there are plenty of large gaps in
| traffic is more reasonable.
|
| So yes, thanks for pointing that out, I'm not a model
| citizen. I don't even feel bad about it. Also, physical
| goods are obviously exactly the same, so your made-up story
| is totally relevant, and nobody asks the question why you
| changed it from a virtual to a physical good when you had
| complete artistic freedom. Maybe your story would not be as
| convincing?
| pwdisswordfishs wrote:
| I don't understand. (For example: what you mean "except"
| and how much of a bad person you are and the tone of your
| last paragraph?) It sounds like you're arguing with me
| (and you think I'm arguing with you).
| aqme28 wrote:
| I have often found that the illegal sites have much better UX
| for finding movies to watch. I can filter by review score, year
| of release, genre, country of origin, or half dozen other
| variables and in all combinations. And then they're presented
| in a big readable table rather than five options I have to
| scroll endlessly through one at a time.
| pimeys wrote:
| With usually the best reviews compared to Rotten Tomatoes
| et.al.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Not true. My experience is the UX is okay to good, but often
| there's click-bait ad-serving friction and distraction.
|
| You never know if your search is get you what you want, bring
| up a pop-up of HotLonelyBabes4U (when you're looking for kids
| cartoons), or take you to a scam site that wants you to
| download a "helper."
|
| Aside from that, the experience is rarely _terrible_ - like
| the trad video streaming sites that give you endless
| horizontal scrolling lists sorted very broadly by topic, kind
| of, with an entertaining randomness about the categories.
| aqme28 wrote:
| It sounds like we used different sites.
|
| To be fair, a good adblock is MANDATORY on these streaming
| sites.
| joshmn wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's
| incredibly hard to scale personality--which I have in spades--
| and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer
| support individual to operate equally as themselves.
|
| You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have
| bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty
| of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was
| rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being
| short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as
| to tell the person my situation and they told me that because
| I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in
| particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he
| churned.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they
| told me that because I 'm providing a service I have to do
| better._
|
| IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a
| customer anyway.
| joshmn wrote:
| That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every
| customer is a good customer. While I did have really
| accessible customer service, I didn't want to be everything
| to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks
| and features of the site where enough for the typical
| Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those
| who were accustomed to official services, sports or
| otherwise.
| internet_points wrote:
| His https://prison.josh.mn/self page was remarkably interesting
| and insightful. Some nuggets:
|
| > Contrast what society says rehabilitation is versus what it
| actually feels like. How much of it depends on luck, personality,
| or privilege?
|
| > people want linear redemption stories, but real self-
| improvement is messy, nonlinear, and impossible to A/B test.
|
| > There's a certain freedom in owning your story publicly. People
| can't weaponize what you've already made peace with.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I used to think ethics were a set of rules to follow. Now I
| think they're more like tests--constant ones--that you run
| against your own motivations.
|
| Is the big one. And interestingly, single guys doing stuff that
| is ethically defensible are at a larger risk of ending up in
| trouble with the law than big corporations doing _far_ worse
| stuff. So the lesson at a personal level is a completely
| different one than at the corporate level, there it is 'what
| we can get away with' versus 'what we should do to be good
| citizens'.
| RajT88 wrote:
| If you want to take a broad view of the world, we may be
| entering into the post-age-of-enlightenment age where truth
| and ethics are malleable in service of the larger powers
| which build the things which comprise the world.
| joshmn wrote:
| Thanks for the sentiment.
|
| The last quote in particular is rather timely: on Wednesday I
| "came out" to the entire company that I work for with a cheeky
| slideshow, which started as an "about me" during an all-hands
| ("look, we have a new employee!") and then was like, "oh yeah
| also..."
|
| Being able to shape the narrative and tell my side of the story
| before someone sees some of the slanted reporting has continued
| to prove helpful. I even went so far as to say "I know people
| Google their colleagues sometimes and that's cool just be aware
| that the truth is usually in the middle of what the DOJ says
| and what actually happened."
| yard2010 wrote:
| Josh you are a gift to our society. Too bad it's controlled
| by crooked villains. Don't ever change.
| pwdisswordfishs wrote:
| > Being able to shape the narrative
|
| Don't overestimate your success. I remember reading the
| original prison post and (a) seeing how thick the attempt to
| do that sort of "shaping" was, and (b) still coming away
| thinking, "Just... wow" (not in a good way).
|
| Even if it seems like you're winning because all you're
| seeing is people falling over themselves to tell you how
| awesome your story is and how awesome you are, take a look
| around the room. If it's a room of 10 and the praise is
| really only coming from 6 people, don't neglect to account
| for the fact that there are 4 other people in the room who
| are also capable of thought, and they probably have thoughts
| (and the fact that they can see the other 6 people reacting
| the way they are can be a factor in whether to voice them).
|
| 8be5229b62d4a6631d6e4571845ffb0ca5e554dee569e04dbc299f2d72d42
| 211
| foofoo12 wrote:
| > Send fun emails
|
| Yes, do that. Also a tangent: remind me why you're sending me an
| email if you haven't sent one in many months.
|
| Sometimes I see an interesting project that hasn't launched. They
| just have an "sign up for news updates".
|
| Then 12 months later I get a standard news email and I have no
| clue what it is and ignore it.
|
| At least start your email with something like "Hey, 12 months ago
| you signed up for the mega cool electron thunder splitter. We've
| launched!"
| joshmn wrote:
| This one was really important to me. Even the transactional
| emails were a bit fun to read. I kept them informal, as if I
| was talking to a friend of a friend. I certainly swore in them,
| too (at myself), when I was apologizing for things not working
| right.
|
| Occasionally I'd get replies saying that the person looked
| forward to me automatically emailing them. That was a good
| litmus test.
| encom wrote:
| >Send fun emails.
|
| Eh... I lean towards "no" on that point, unless you can do it
| well. I've received far too many reddit-tier fellow kids/omg so
| random/cringe emails, and I hate it. An example from Queal (a
| Soylent-style meal powder): Winter is coming in
| Westeros and you must prepare by stocking up on food. Who knows
| if Drogon will fly by and burn your storage of snacks. Or the
| Night King will come to reign in the long winter. So prepare to
| receive a package from *REDACTED* with tracking ID: *REDACTED*
| You can keep an eye on the progress of your package with this
| tracking link *REDACTED*. People in the Seven Kingdoms
| still use carrier pigeons, so please note it could take up to a
| full workday for the link to become active. Autumn will
| end soon enough, be prepared!
|
| Please just fucking stop. I really like their product, but
| their emails make my blood boil. Don't be like Queal.
| joshmn wrote:
| Oh, that's gross. Mine weren't that fun. They were more
| informal and usually self-deprecating (within good taste).
|
| The closest to that was the quarterly newsletter: I'd
| highlight the awful and frustrating bugs that nobody saw, and
| some of the funny emails I got.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I would not call it a "piracy" streaming site.
|
| I would call it a hero-site. That's what they are - they are
| heroes for unrestricting information.
|
| Take ublock origin. Now, many say it is an ad-blocker; the ublock
| origin author says the extension is a generic content blocker. I
| agree with that but I go further: I call ublock origin a hero-
| blocker, or better, a heroic blocker. It blocks unwanted things
| in general. For similar reasons I think the term "piratebay" is
| old. It made more sense in the 2000s. Now I would call it
| herobay.
|
| People may wonder about those terms, but I think it is important
| to use better terms than old terms. The old terms often were
| hijacked by the law system and mega-corporations with their own
| particular interests. It is time that the people re-define the
| law. Law should serve the people.
| patanegra wrote:
| Pirating of course exists. You might rebrand it, but hardly as
| hero-, more like theft-. Theftbay would sound good to me.
| cwillu wrote:
| Found the villain.
| lazyfanatic42 wrote:
| Copying isn't theft.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| Down the rabbit hole we go.
| JohnLocke4 wrote:
| Preventing someone from getting value out of their work is
| theft - not matter how it is done. Copying a dead person's
| work isn't theft because a dead person can't create value,
| but stealing a dead person's car is still theft, because
| something of value is gone.
|
| Stealing a car you were never going to buy and making an
| exact replica of a car you were never going to buy is two
| entirely different things.
| davedx wrote:
| > Preventing someone from getting value out of their work
| is theft
|
| No, it's not. You (or random large media corps) do not
| get to unilaterally redefine words of the English
| language like that.
|
| Pass whatever laws you want about it, enforce them
| however you feel is appropriate, but don't try to
| redefine language itself to push your agenda.
|
| https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/theft
| kube-system wrote:
| "IP theft" is not counter to that definition.
| Intellectual property is a 'something'. That definition,
| does not require depriving someone else of something. As
| another valid example, see "identity theft".
|
| Furthermore, English is not prescriptive; dictionaries
| are a lagging reference of observed use... so yes, the
| users of English absolutely do get to redefine language.
| That's how all modern English words originated.
|
| And finally, if your dictionary doesn't account for "IP
| theft", you have simply found an incorrect dictionary,
| because that usage is undeniably widespread -- whether or
| not you agree with the concept politically.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > Intellectual property is a 'something'.
|
| Good thing I don't recognise the existence of that. We
| live in a society that does, and I despise that. At least
| the EU has the sense to not recognise software patents,
| so 'intellectual property' is not all-encompassing. Maybe
| one day they can loosen the grip further.
|
| > As another valid example, see "identity theft".
|
| 'Identity fraud' is a much better term for what this is.
| Someone using my name, phone number and my mother's
| maiden name to get money in my name is not stealing my
| name and phone number; it's just fraud. It's much closer
| to lying than stealing.
| kube-system wrote:
| English is how people use English words. You can not like
| it, but that is simply your opinion.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Never said it was anything but.
| tmerc wrote:
| "IP theft" is a contradiction.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/intellectual_property
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft
|
| Between these two pages, you should be able to understand
| why "ip theft" is a bogus term. It's specifically called
| out in the intellectual property article.
|
| "Unlike other forms of property, intellectual property
| can be used by infinitely many people without depriving
| the original owner of the use of their property."
|
| Whereas theft has this definition: "Theft is the taking
| of another person's personal property with the intent of
| depriving that person of the use of their property."
|
| My not-a-lawyer understanding is that we use a common law
| system in the USA. This means that the definitions for
| things are based on history, previous cases, and the
| statutes that have been codified into law. This is a good
| thing because redefining words can make previously legal
| actions become illegal. Allowing that to happen at the
| pace slang develops in the modern era means we will hold
| people to different standards based on how "hip" they
| are.
| kube-system wrote:
| In a court of law, yes. In colloquial English (as cited
| in the general English-language dictionary above), no,
| the use is much more broad.
| tmerc wrote:
| Ways to prevent someone from extracting value out of
| their work that are clearly not theft:
|
| - murder
|
| - kidnapping
|
| - ddosing their site so they can't sell things
|
| - carpet bombing their reviews with 1 star
|
| - filing an injunction blocking the sale of their product
| on bogus ip claims (aka copyright trolling)
|
| - gaslighting them to the point where they think the idea
| is worthless
|
| - being the owner of IP that prevents them from selling
| their IP
|
| Probably others but I think that's enough to show your
| definition is wrong.
| Aurornis wrote:
| If copying isn't theft then I guess we can stop worrying
| about open source licensing. Anyone, including
| corporations, would be able to take open source code and
| copy it into their own products, reselling it without
| consent or releasing their changes because they haven't
| stolen anything, just copied it, right?
|
| If you spend years of your life writing some software and
| then it accidentally gets revealed to the world by mistake,
| anyone can copy it and use it as their own? Because copying
| isn't theft, theft they haven't stolen anything from you,
| so you have nothing to complain about?
| hamdingers wrote:
| I can't tell if you're sarcastically describing the world
| we live in or if you genuinely haven't realized all these
| things happen regularly. Poe's law I guess.
| kube-system wrote:
| It isn't sarcastic. Copyleft depends on copyright law.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Copyright infringement isn't theft. It's illegal, but
| it's not theft.
| kube-system wrote:
| It does not qualify as the legal offence of "theft" in
| many courtrooms. It may be theft in colloquial English.
| Telaneo wrote:
| A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer having
| whatever is stolen. When I steal your car, phone, bike or
| milk, you no longer have it, and no longer enjoy the
| benefit of it. I'm fairly certain that's the part of
| theft most people have a problem with. If I zap your car
| and produce a perfect duplicate, and drive that duplicate
| away, leaving your car as if nothing had ever happened,
| other than minutiae like the VINs and licence plates
| being identical, I cannot imagine anyone having a problem
| with that. Nobody is going to call that theft. If you
| still believe that's theft, then I cannot understand
| where you're coming from.
|
| This does not hold true for copyright infringement. When
| I copy Die Hard 3: The Expendables' Return of the Jedi,
| the original owner/copyright holder still has it. As they
| still have it, I have not deprived them of their work or
| good, and calling it theft makes about as much sense as
| me making a copy of the milk in your fridge and taking
| that copy.
| hamdingers wrote:
| It's not worth the effort. Anyone pretending not to
| understand the distinction is being deliberately obtuse.
| Telaneo wrote:
| I should really be able to recognise that by now. This is
| exactly the kind of discussion that has burned me out on
| using certain platforms before.
|
| Thanks for putting it in plain text.
| kube-system wrote:
| Nah, the people who pretend that definitions in a
| criminal law book override natural linguistics are being
| deliberately obtuse. Language exists mostly outside of a
| courtroom.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XT-l-_3y0
| kube-system wrote:
| > A pretty big part of theft is the victim no longer
| having whatever is stolen.
|
| No, colloquial English doesn't require this. e.g.
| "Identity theft"
| Telaneo wrote:
| Given that identity fraud leads directly into what is
| functionally actual theft (taking money out of you bank
| account or taking up loans in your name and scarpering),
| there's no wonder the term's confused. Doesn't make it
| theft though.
| kube-system wrote:
| It isn't _legally_ theft, but because people commonly use
| the word that way, it _is_ colloquially theft. The
| qualifications are different. Legal crimes are defined by
| law. English is defined by its common use. They 're not
| necessarily the same thing.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Just as many wiki's are called Wikipedias, by analogy
| with the biggest ones; that is, they aren't. Or maybe
| more fitting here, the word 'download', which can mean
| data transfer or modification in pretty much any way with
| a person not knowledgeable about computers.[1] Those uses
| aren't uncommon, but they are nevertheless wrong.
|
| I think you just finished a circle there, so I don't
| think there's much reason to continue this line of
| enquiry, given neither of us is going to change our
| stance.
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/download#Verb
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Good. Bacteria have the right idea about plasmid-
| swapping. Information is meant to be collective.
| kube-system wrote:
| Of course, if you give people fewer incentives to share
| their information they can and often will simply keep it
| private. You can't copy information that people never
| gave to you, regardless of the law.
| tmerc wrote:
| "they haven't stolen anything from you" correct by the
| legal definition as my non lawyer brain reads it.
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft
|
| "so you have nothing to complain about" incorrect.
| Copyright infringement is it's own crime with it's own
| penalities.
|
| The terminology section of this Wikipedia article is
| quite informative on why copying is not theft according
| to the US Supreme Court.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
|
| A big difference in theft vs copyright infringement is if
| you go to jail or not (criminal vs civil). Again, not a
| lawyer.
| JuniperMesos wrote:
| Yes this would be one of many consequences of a world
| where copyright was actually killed or seriously ganked.
| raincole wrote:
| Really? Have you read this post at all?
|
| This is a monetized streaming site that spams reddit users.
| This is the hero in your mind? Is your philosophy that as long
| as the legal IP holders don't get paid it's great?
| relaxing wrote:
| > My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts
| mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where
| to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of
| those posts and encouraged them to comment--transparently--about
| why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link.
|
| Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end.
| Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations,
| is a scourge. I'm sorry he wasn't sent to jail longer.
|
| And as with most criminal cases, it's astonishing how little
| money he made for his trouble.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much
| the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate,
| special, important business.
|
| Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the
| journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about
| is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of
| flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't
| bother to create account anymore.
| joshmn wrote:
| I'm sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit
| with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally
| checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent "don't
| spam" only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each
| source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came
| from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually
| check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user
| wasn't just schilling--if an unreasonable (see: 3) last
| comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask
| them to remove them.
|
| That probably doesn't change your perception--I, too, feel
| like Reddit is pretty bad these days--but I felt the need to
| say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had
| placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation.
| Building trust was important to my operation, from both a
| growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When
| shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the
| mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an
| attempted fix was in the works.
| joshmn wrote:
| Author here. This is funny to wake up to. A version of this
| microsite was posted previously
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45434062) though it didn't
| have much of the content that exists here.
|
| If anyone has any general questions (it seems like my little
| "startup lessons" page is as popular as the others) I'm be happy
| to answer them as long as they're not too technical or related to
| my finances. However, the specifics of the technical side of my
| site are best found on TorrentFreak, and, in short: curl
| commands.
| _def wrote:
| You wrote about "small, honest teams" - the older I get the
| more I get the hunch that small teams/companies are a great way
| to go for me. Basically, choose some field you enjoy working
| in, with people you like. Any thoughts on how to find something
| like this? I feel like its the kind of thing you have to start
| yourself, but I can't take much risk.
| joshmn wrote:
| My experience in finding one (15 people at the company I'm
| currently at, and I'm one of 3.5 engineers) (.5 because
| founder still codes more than we'd like him to) was
| effectively reaching out to companies that I knew didn't have
| job postings up, and was the size that I'd fit into. I
| learned quickly that not every vacancy is posted publicly.
| chanux wrote:
| > not every vacancy is posted publicly
|
| Thanks for this insight, hopefully would help me.
|
| Also, love the bit "small, honest teams". Aligns really
| well with my biases.
| twentyfiveoh1 wrote:
| I was just just interested in how your "say no" lesson came
| from the streaming site. I am sure they asked you for all sorts
| of channels, but from their perspective, I kind of understand
| it. I had really wondered what kind of crazy of stuff you were
| shooting down. I didn't expect anyone to go too crazy on
| expecting feature requests on a pirate site.
| joshmn wrote:
| The typical ones were things like MMA/UFC/boxing, and those
| I'd say no to because their business model revolves around
| PPV; things like NCAA sports I said no to because I refused
| to profit off children (NIL didn't exist at the time) and
| that the implementation would have required me to "integrate"
| more than 5 different services just to attempt parity; I'd
| get the occasional EPL or UEFA requests, too.
|
| I really didn't have any significant demand for these. One of
| my litmus tests, besides demand, was "okay, can this be as
| good as the other sports' implementations?" I was always
| concerned about feature parity--I could have provided radio
| feeds for MLB but not for NBA, and that would cause people to
| say "well they have radio feeds for x but not y" and create
| confusion as to what is what. Being consistent in this regard
| was important.
|
| The run-of-the-mill IPTV requests came and went, and I just
| wasn't interested in that. Ultimately I made the site for me
| so I could watch sports, I just had some other people
| watching with me.
| blahaj wrote:
| Were you aware of the risk you were getting yourself into when
| you built heheStreams? Did you take any precautions and how did
| you sleep at night?
| msh wrote:
| I don't understand how people think that they have a good
| chance of getting away with something like this?
|
| There must be safer ways to make good money?
| joshmn wrote:
| It wasn't about the money whatsoever.
| dormento wrote:
| Btw you ever got you gh acct back? Really shitty situation,
| best wishes
| joshmn wrote:
| Thanks for asking. No, not yet, I'm working on introducing
| myself to their legal team with hopes that they might be able
| to take that as serious enough to believe I am me.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I recently learned that, just like most other businesses, a lot
| of free pirate streaming sites are actually powered by a few big
| content aggregators[1][2][3]. They don't do much beyond providing
| a nice-looking frontend to an unauthenticated API that those
| aggregators expose.
|
| One could probably spin one of these up in an afternoon (if
| making money was not the goal). The barriers of entry to this
| ecosystem are a lot lower than I ever imagined.
|
| Those aggregators serve their own ads (what you get through the
| API is a link to a web player embed, not to the video directly).
| I suspect that bigger sites get some kind of kickback for
| bringing in traffic to those players.
|
| [1] https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-highlights-rapidly-expanding-
| hy... [2] http://vidsrcme.ru/ [3] https://streamed.pk/docs
| joshmn wrote:
| This is relatively new and an interesting business model.
| There's also "piracy as a service"
| https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-and-netflix-signal-piracy...
| jaffa2 wrote:
| > My copywriting was tongue-in-cheek and self-deprecating. It was
| all me, no bullshit. I treated every message--even transactional
| emails--as an opportunity to build trust.
|
| What does this mean? what is this 'trust' that is built ? how
| does an email build 'trust' Is this to do with whether I beleive
| the email came from where it says it does ? or somethign else. A
| lot of this article seemed a little vague in the business
| buzzword bullshit type way.
|
| Bro, you gotta just build Trust(tm) for this one growth hack(tm)
| joshmn wrote:
| It's a bit vague, I'll admit. Users in this space are typically
| plagued by poorly written emails, or emails that are still,
| "Hello," if any greeting at all; they also often come from
| noreplys and close you off from the operator.
|
| By presenting myself as, well, myself, having an informal tone
| (I mentioned to another user that I talked to everyone as if
| they were a friend of a friend), and always closing with "if
| you need anything just reply :)," it was a good way to reach
| users and to establish the human element.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| I suppose its a manifestation of the old adage the people do
| business with people. You are presenting as 'you', a human,
| an individual that will give the personal touch. Not some
| corporation that has 'departments' and acts as a faceless
| churn machine.
|
| Personally I'd rather have no emails of either type. Too many
| emails these days about everything. No I don't want to review
| X, or provide content for you (not you) for Y. I guess some
| people like it though.
| Havoc wrote:
| I'd absolutely hate being on the receiving end of some of these.
| e.g.
|
| >I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to
| comment
|
| A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list. I'm
| trying to buy a service in exchange for money, not get spammed
| about being someone's guerilla marketing team for free / and or
| getting roped into a referral scheme.
|
| I don't mind organically advocating for things I've had a good
| experience with but not like this
| joshmn wrote:
| I replied to another comment about further context:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845763
|
| In short, I made sure that the subject matter was right--"how
| can I stream the Lakers when I am in Los Angeles"--and that
| there was no schilling. I ensured that users were otherwise
| active in the communities that they were posting in, and that
| it wasn't just spamming referral links. Everything had to be
| tasteful or I'd kick them off the platform, which happened once
| after the person told me they were going to do it anyway.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah I think it's a valid business strategy that you're
| entitled to do and to be clear wasn't meaning to imply any
| sort of ethical concerns.
|
| Maybe this is a personal hangup my side but not a fan of paid
| services trying to extract additional value via other routes
| too - whether that's selling your data, taking up attention
| by bombarding me with marketing, cross-selling, showing me
| ads...or asking me to do guerilla marketing.
|
| The closer companies stick to "I give you money, you give me
| service" the better I judge them. Maybe I'm just jaded...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > A service doing this would instantly be on my shit list.
|
| Most people would just ignore it and move on if they didn't
| want to participate. Sweating the small stuff is no good for
| one's health. I personally don't dedicate any brain cells to a
| shit list. Sounds stressful.
| maxglute wrote:
| The UI of some piracy streaming sites are better than legit sites
| with much less hoops to jump through than torrents/Usenet or
| region locked legal services for rare stuff.
| tryauuum wrote:
| > noreply@ is absolutely stupid.
|
| the reason noreply addresses exist is to avoid endless autoreply
| loops caused by poorly programmed mail software
| Projectiboga wrote:
| How did you get your reading material? Was it the facility
| library, or just all ordered and mailed in?
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