I owned and operated an adult website for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was primary source of income. It was completely lawful and above board, no user-generated-content so I never once had any issues with controversial content etc. One day last year we get a notice from our bank telling us that we were deemed "high risk" and they were closing our commercial accounts. For months we tried to find any bank or credit union that would take us but they all turned us down.
Someone actually posted our story to HN but it's not really tech related so didn't get many upvotes or engagement.
So I know how devastating it is for ignorance and stupidity on the part of the others to shut down something that a) you worked hard to create yourself and b) was such a huge part of your life for so long. Extreme empathy.
Certain factions of society are getting better at pushing their narratives, via the power they have amassed. It's hard to watch, for sure.
https://www.ft.com/content/762e4648-06d7-4abd-8d1e-ccefb74b3...
The engagement on HN tends to be due to interest in story but also time of day and other stories and specific wording of title and other fickle factors. I find that HN has a lot of interest in freedom of expression and how it interacts with banking sector, but sometimes topics slip nonetheless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33425319
The story was posted before we closed, and we had put up a notice to our visitors explaining that we were trying to find alternate banking arrangements and would have to shut down if we couldn't.
If you visit the site today, there is still some NFSW content, so beware. But it also has all of the details of the history of the site as well as what led to us having to shut it down if anyone is interested.
High risk of what, chargebacks?
This likely caused the card companies, as well as affiliated banks, to re-evaluate their customers and get any adult site off, including the user at the top of this comment thread.
Was his site allowing user-generated content? No. Was he at risk of facilitating child porn? Also no. Would the banks and card companies be willing to research that and make exceptions for a single account? Unlikely.
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/visa-to-stop-processing-payments-...
They flex this by putting leverage on the banks to not support this either, as they could lose the ability to work with Visa or Mastercard if they start doing banking outside their TOS.
There are some reasons why this could be a good thing - pornography is an industry rife with problems of trafficking, abuse, etc. and denying funding of that kind of behaviour is not without reason. But this tends to spill over to just about everything that /isn't/ abusive as well, which leads to adult sites and the like not being able to secure their own funding or get support from banks.
You'd think that annoying complaints from a minority of self-righteous people wouldn't have so much power in banking, but they seem to get listened to time and again.
We consulted with a lawyer, not because we thought what our bank did was actionable, but just to explore options. First thing our lawyer said to us is "I want to make sure that you're not expecting that I can waive my magic lawyer wand and force the bank to reverse their decision right?" Of course we didn't expect that, but I did want to know if we had any rights that were being infringed and I had a few ideas about what to do with the business's money should the worst case scenario play out and I wanted to get a legal opinion and advise.
How is that higher risk than taking on a random entirely new customer.
Also, from what our visitors often told us, there was a perception that our site was 100% ad-free. This is because the content was all there to promote affiliate programs. I know that it's common for people to ask "why would anyone pay for porn when there is so much free stuff out there?" My 18 year "career" in the industry taught me that it is a symbiotic relationship. The free stuff advertises for the subscription based sites, and neither would exist without the other.
Doable, but probably not good for an adult toy/porn site.
> Google Adsense was profitable on the site for many years, earning me some really nice pay checks here and there. That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks. Since there there has been next to no profit, and that was years ago.
Be very cautious about services in that field as there are lots of shady things going on, and the ban hammer falls hard, and there's often no remaining options if you lose adsense.
Maybe it's time to not let it stand anymore? I know, we're just a bunch of ragtag hackers who just want to be able to have time to tinker and make/play video games. But we're the ones who could truly disrupt online advertising and get the web back to how it used to work 20 years ago, where the average person could earn residual income online with a few clicks. Get back to building a positive, thriving future together, instead of whatever all this is.
Of course I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Or how to protect people from exploitation. There's a website that pays you tips for your traffic, it's a synonym for gratuity but for the life of me I can't remember it at the moment. Google and even DuckDuckGo are so SEO'd that I can't find it. Imagine a nonprofit Adwords that paid out near 100% of proceeds in an egalitarian way, instead of using a winner-take-all algorithm that dumps more money than God on people who are already rich. I guess that's just not possible?
I mean, many of the people on this website are the people who work for and enable these very companies in their injustice. The first step is to accept that, if you work for one of these companies, you are the injustice. "But I only work there, I don't make decisions!" people will claim; yet, at the end of the day, they are not only directly enabling these injustices but are very directly benefiting from them! We need to stop talking about these big tech companies as if they are abstract all-powerful gods acting from afar... somewhere, there is a software developer--with a human name--who built this automatic ban system.
At the very least, if you have any friends who work for these companies, and if they aren't actively working from within to make something better--or like... don't have some pretty epic sob story about how they can't get another job and really really need the money for some reason (I'm going to leave this exact line up to the reader, as it is frankly negligible: the vast majority of the people who work at these big tech companies are not hurting for the money and are often part of a whole host of other problems in localized inequality)--it should be made clear to them that you are not OK with their moral tradeoffs.
The falsity of an Ad Support Web is what needs to die.
Is this really the best we can do in 2023, after investing trillions in ad tech over the decades?
The centralization, and I'd argue way over centralized, of the web has hurt innovation in the advertisement and marketing space.
People like yourself are going to make this happen by push innovation, it may just be as user but it counts
So many thoughtful replies, thank you all! After reading them, it sounds like we currently lack a way of paying into an internet commons where funds get distributed to the sites we visit most. Something like a water utility, where its very existence is priceless, but we don't have to think about it each time we turn on the tap, because the unit price of rinsing dishes is almost too cheap to meter. Cryptocurrency has potential to power something like that, but concerns around privacy and having too much money pulled from bank accounts have not been entirely addressed yet.
To flip this on its head, some suggested that we're only looking at internet ads from the supply side. Looking at the demand side might show that people want to actively pay to support websites they enjoy. Especially if that suppresses ads where it's implemented. But there's currently no mainstream way to donate perhaps $5-30 per month to provide a kind of internet universal basic income with zero fees.
Off the top of my head, one of the most popular recipients might be something like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to lobby against dystopian legislation from the RIAA/MPAA, for example. The first legislation to target might be to ban bans and enforce transparency, so that all customers have a guaranteed right to dispute any ban and be restored within say 2 weeks, or be refunded any proceeds from before their account was suspended. Which might get ad companies to do their jobs and stop fraud internally, as well as cultivate competitors who advertize a lower ban rate.
Some good starting points:
Patreon
ACH
FedNow
Faster Payments
SEPA
NPP
Cash App
Google Contributor
Brave Rewards
Zcash's shielded pool
Flattr
Kindle Unlimited
Youtube Premium
Venmo
PayPalIf everybody blocks the ads, advertisers will run them elsewhere and we'll get the Internet back. We might see some collateral damage, like ads embedded into works themselves, but this is easy enough to remedy with SponsorBlock and its ilk.
They became fat and lazy.
They need competition or to be broken apart.
Thankfully no one was interested, more like the opposite. The FOSS community is full of people who passionately hate promotion. If they see it on the horizon they explode in rage.
Meanwhile I cant find things I know must exist and no one knows what I've made. There has to be an answer to the riddle but it takes better men than me.
Premium features and such are a possibility, but I don't really see the value for people to pay for this beyond maybe a tiny community, and they would surely need some premium features in return (like maybe private torrents or something).
so then you're running ads for porn, sketchy software and VPNs or wtv
In any case, your story reminds me of the good ol' days of the web. Back in high school, being able to just put up a cool site and have people magically find it through Google felt like god mode. I never ran anything big like your torrent site (which I'm pretty sure I've visited), but I imagine you got a lot of satisfaction out of having thousands of users.
I miss the days when the web was this simple. Now I constantly question the time investment of creating a website because the (im)material condition has changed so much; the search algorithm is completely different and so many people use a small handful of platforms. Unless you generate eye candy and it goes viral, or it competes with major internet companies, I'm under the impression that you can just forget it.
I also miss the good old days. It all felt smaller looking back, but still huge back then in a lot of ways.
Being found on Google and starting a community off that alone does seem like a pipe dream now, but I think mostly because of how people interact with the web and the platforms they are siloed into by default.
Feel free to reach out if you're genuinely interested in passing on the torch:
torrents@cosmo.red
You mean before AdSense and SEO or exactly what the site’s author does for living?
I suppose it was inevitable in the drive of the commercialization of everything in life?
By simple, I meant in the sense that some kid in high school could put up a site that's not rich in JavaScript, have people find it organically, not need to worry so much about scaling or DDOS, not need to worry about GDPR, not have the expectation of accessibility, and not need to have an iOS and Android app for people to actually use it.
This isn't to say that the same technology used in say 2005 can't be used today. But it's a time investment with not nearly as much of a likelihood of seeing a meaningful return.
"In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
If it is, it'll be interesting to see how the law will develop (across the globe) regarding fake/generated content in the time of GPTs and such.
Keeping "fresh" torrents on the front page probably mattered more, at least it would have to me as a user.
They'll be getting better at it and harder to spot now though.
It would also be interesting to make a forum that’s completely upfront about it. Just make it a feature. Make them post on a realistic schedule to keep the forums idling. Ultimately not that useful but it would be interesting to play with.
Or make it a game. Make some persona for someone that is an expert in something and a prick. The game is to argue with them and convince enough of the other accounts that you’re right.
Kudos to you for bringing something into the world that did something meaningful. Not to mention all the tangential benefits you mention like learning SEO, hosting, and so on. As good as a degree but without all the drinking.
You should have enough detail to at least provide magnet links, but an SQL dump of the content would be very, very interesting for future folks.
> Not allowed to browse Copyright Infringement category
[1] - https://archive.is/20220521124546/http://www.legittorrents.i...
In fact I just found out about 12ft.io like a week or 2 ago and bookmarked it for that reason.
I made a few thousand on YouTube in 2011 I believe and then got heavily into web development. In 2015ish I placed some ugly adsense ads on a site I had and was only a couple dollars away from $100 payout. So... I manually clicked an ad like less then 10 times. Sure enough my account got banned from adsense.
It got me completely demotivated from programming and only last year did I pick back up programming. I was using Node.js and Go back then but I'm now into Rust and Erlang. Not sure how I can profit as I lack work history (giving up on self teaching myself programming also meant I took up dead end jobs), but I'm motivated nonetheless. Google, pick on someone your own size.
Take a little responsibility for your actions and situation. “I did fraud and got banned because of it and that ban demotivated me from being a programmer.”
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-ads-pu...
I think I'll sleep tight knowing I'm not the bad one here, buddy.
> I ran it out of my bedroom at my parents house for a long time, eventually switching over to a VPS sometime when I moved out.
This brings back many memories from my high school and early college days. I used to run a file and image hosting site (legal content only), and it's amusing to think about the lengths I went to save money. My domain purchase (.com for $8/year or so) felt like a significant investment. I managed to host the site with a considerable number of users out of my parent's basement on a 768kbps upload DSL connection for several years. Eventually, I migrated to a VPS that cost me around $20/month.
I ended up selling the site to another hosting service for approximately $700 because it became too much work. In retrospect, I'm guessing it was a no-brainer move for them since they acquired something like 10k users for $700, but from my perspective, I was happy to receive $700.
It means you buy other peoples' time with your money so you don't have to spend your own time. Conversely, you spend your own time so you don't have to buy other peoples' time with your money.
In case others are curious to see what it looked like while in operation, here's the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.legittorrents.info...
I love the Wayback Machine for this!
ps. if you could make the images link to source and it's going to take less than a minute of your time, it may be worth it :)
Do you mean use the full URL in image references? If so, why exactly?
Eventually I found an addon to help bulk remove torrents, but even that was a hassle. Eventually in the later years I turned on email verification, which didn't actually work (I never bothered to figure out why) and if someone really wanted to upload, they would post on the forum to which I would then manually verify them.
But why?
Advertisers have the same problem. Adwords sucks. Facebook ads sucks and are very expensive. There are few alternatives so it's an easy sell.
There was some odd rap uploaded for sure. There was also some really cool video game music remakes I remember finding.
> That is, until I got my Adsense account banned by trying out some too good to be true website purchases that turned out to be using fraudulent clicks.
What does that "website purchases" mean?
"The early days was where a lot of time was spent trying to tell people about the website. Some of my fondest memories are of being at school on Digg.com (back before the v4 fiasco of course) and posting comments to the Upcoming / Hot section where stories were at right before they hit the front page. Almost always the first comments in the thread would become the top comments, with no way to sort, and I would always sign my comment with legittorrents.info. Then later I would come back and check the Google Analytics stats to see those sweet sweet traffic spikes."
This is GENIUS. It's a shame signatures are dead now, I kind of liked them when they weren't annoying.
"I cannot state enough how much I learned from running this site and others. Way better than a degree in my opinion."
It's funny how often this works out like this. I think you can "make it" in software with either hobby experience or a formal degree, and of the two I think the hobby experience is a lot more likely to make you good at "shipping". But the context you get out of a CS degree is super helpful because it compliments your actual work in a thousand tiny (or big, depending on the topic) ways. (Writing CRUD apps is probably not going to flex your CS degree but if someone asks you to optimize a database query, suddenly that second databases class you took about query planners and db internals is suddenly really helpful context.) But I agree with the sentiment here where having hobby experience on top of your CS degree is rocket fuel for your career.
"I was super cheap back then, not even wanting to shell out for a domain name, so the original URL was virtenu.dyndns.org/lt. Eventually I bought the .info for $0.99 after the site picked up some speed a few months later."
Compared to how easy it is to be wasteful nowadays, there's still really something to be said for intentionally running things on a shoestring budget. (And sometimes we convince ourselves you practically have to be wasteful... isn't running a $20/mo managed k8s + load balancer setup table stakes nowadays?? and you've got to have a hip new $40/yr TLD and don't forget to factor in that surprise big egress bandwidth bill you're gonna accidentally incur at some point).
Crazy how much you can do with a $5 VPS and an app server, distributed as a package for your OS's package manager, running as a systemd service. Even just adding a container runtime can be a surprising additional amount of complexity.
Back then I was in high school and it was literally spend nothing you don't have to and avoid having to get a job for as long as possible. Good times!
It's cool seeing some of the most popular shows there like Revision3, it reminds me of Digg, Kevin Rose and my favorite online show, thebroken. Really cool period in internet history. Thanks for hosting for so long!
I had high hopes for Revision3, it was really an exciting time with Web 2.0 and the like.
I probably tried to contribute some RuneScape-related content, but it likely didn't stay seeded for long haha.
Thanks for maintaining such a great website.
I definitely remember some RuneScape stuff on there, I played it a lot in the early 2000's myself.
Not sure I have ever had anyone comment on my writing style. Probably means I should write more!
> my first exposures to implementing SEO (what I now do for a living), which funny enough was mostly copied tags from The Pirate Bay and modified to be about legal torrents instead
It's already starting to feel nostalgic.
It's effectively a large-scale legal torrent site for anyone to use.
there's a strong intention against free digital assets.
the logic of the market is imposing itself over the digital realm (the inside of the internet?)
this logic wants us to pay to copy. why should only some get to keep the enormous advantage unlocked by digital information while the rest are forced to pay?
to be fair this is also in reaction to https://torrentfreak.com/brazils-ministry-of-justice-asks-go...