
RapidShare is Shutting down - mattstrayer
https://www.rapidshare.com/home
======
nezza-_-
When Megaupload (and some other sharehosters) died, quite a lot of interesting
things just disappeared from the net.

I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-
developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones
continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your
G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck.

It's sad that there's basically no way for an organisation like archive.org to
archive things from sharehosters given the unclear (or quite clearly
black/gray) law situation and also the missing cooperation with the
sharehosters themselves.

~~~
stusmall
>I'm talking about things like small tools that were shared on e.g. xda-
developers before Github came, about fan-mods for games etc... The 'big' ones
continued living, but if you now e.g. search for a special kernel/ROM for your
G1/ADP1 you are mostly out of luck.

This is something that has always sketched me out about the Android rooting
and moding scene. "Download this suspect binary from rapid share and run it as
root" seemed to be a cornerstone of it.

~~~
danudey
It's the same with things like game trainers, save editors, etc.. Sign up and
give your e-mail address to this forum so that you can see the download link
for this file. Which is an outdated version. The new version is in another
forum thread on a separate forum, but you have to register to see links. The
link is to a rapidshare download page, which rest assured is totally legit.

I honestly don't understand why more people don't create Github accounts and
use that to distribute, or at least use their ISP's free web space. Most of
these tools have names, are well-known, and are the top hit on Google, but
none of them have an actual website that you can go to to see if they've
released new versions, something for other games, etc.

It's all very sketch.

~~~
jhchabran
Trainers, save editors, translations are basically a common entry point into
programming, like a closed knit group of people that love video games and who
wants to modify/hack/translate their favourites games. At some point,
programming comes to the table and people will start sharing knowledge about
it with their own way of doing things. A popular project will get hosted
somewhere and the following projects will get hosted there too, simply because
they're learning by looking at the popular one. Rapidshare, megauploads, all
of these are tools people know before getting into programming, so they just
use it. Github is something that comes later, if things get serious.

Dwarf fortress stuff is like that, Minecraft is even worse, you get adfly in
the middle :D

~~~
blueskin_
>Dwarf fortress stuff is like that

dffd exists for things that aren't github(etc)-appropriate such as tools. No
real reason to use anything else unless you're trying to monetise it with
adf.ly etc (which might also count as a reason not to download).

------
SyneRyder
Even as an indie software developer, this makes me sad.

Rapidshare was the most responsive to copyright complaints out of all the
filesharing sites, they took down links within 2 hours of being reported. But
instead of nuking cracks to my software on Rapidshare immediately, it meant I
let the Rapidshare links stay alive longer, because I knew I could turn them
off whenever I wanted. I'd rather people uploaded cracks to RapidShare where I
could see how popular / unpopular a link was & had control over when to remove
it, than somewhere like MegaUpload that would deliberately take a long time to
remove links.

I never saw evidence of piracy helping sales (always hurt sales) and I never
used it for promotion, but I was more worried about cracks that came bundled
with a virus, or that came bundled with a collection of illegal images. That
stuff had to be nuked straight away for the protection of customers (and since
much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't come from the
company that makes the software).

~~~
onli
> (and since much of the time, customers never understood that cracks don't
> come from the company that makes the software).

I never saw that. Even when I was young, that was something obvious, and I
never heard someone else mention that he beliefs cracks come from the company
making the original software. Where is that coming from? Is that your
impression because you get support requests for cracks?

~~~
SyneRyder
Yup, I get some support requests where I have to explain to the customer that
they never bought the software. They'll tell me the Photoshop Tutorial they
downloaded my software from, inevitably with a link to a Rapidshare download.
They're not looking at URLs and might not even understand they're downloading
from a different website to the tutorial. Some have told me they got my
software from "a Photoshop Tutorial that you advertised your software on".
Ugh.

It's worth noting that while I have customers of all ages, many are older /
elderly (many in their late 60s and a few in their 80s & 90s). They're not the
most tech savvy, they don't understand the cracking scene & some need a lot of
time-consuming handholding. Often wonderful & friendly folks, but they don't
grok computers the same way the usual Hacker News reader will.

------
mmastrac
Torrentfreak has some good editorializing and context around this shutdown:

[https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-
shuts-...](https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-
shuts-150210/)

"Hoping to clear up its image the company made tremendous efforts to cooperate
with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. Among other things,
the company adopted one of the most restrictive sharing policies while
(re)branding itself as a personal cloud storage service.

"The anti-piracy measures seemed to work, but as a result RapidShare’s visitor
numbers plunged. The dwindling revenues eventually cost most of RapidShare’s
employees their jobs."

~~~
DangerousPie
I don't see how this could have ever ended any other way.

RapidShare was clearly only popular in the first place because of piracy. Once
they started restricting that they became just another Dropbox/OneDrive/Google
Drive competitor.

~~~
bryanlarsen
It worked for YouTube. They got their start with pirated content and pivoted
quite successfully.

~~~
nemothekid
>They got their start with pirated content and pivoted quite successfully.

By being bought by Google, then having Google spend 100s of millions of
dollars defending YouTube in court.

------
sandworm
Rapidshare died because the market moved on. "File hosting services" like
rapidshare have been replaced by cutthroat "cyberlockers" like Keep2share and
rapidgator.

The most successful cyberlockers do what Rapidshare decided not to: pay
uploaders, even those who share illegally. And also pay linking sites through
referral schemes far more resilient legally. They aren't trying to appease
anyone not either a customer or a very active uploader. Working with copyright
owners beyond base legal requirements (DMCA et al) isn't the business plan
anymore. Getting into bed with copyright owners was megaupload's and
rapidshare's first mistake. The new plan is to make as much money is possible
then abandon the ship the moment the MPAA looks their way.

Filesharers are ok with this. They purchase monthly subscriptions in full
knowledge that the service might disappear any day. They aren't looking for a
long term relationship anymore. The blind panic resulting from the megaupload
raid ended that expectation.

~~~
quangv
what's the difference betwwen a "cyberlocker" and a "file hosting service" ?

~~~
sandworm
A hosting service pretends to be a dropbox-style service for backing up and
sharing important files. A cyberlocker abandons the pretense, all but calling
for people to share files they don't own in exchange for money.

For me, the line is when you start paying website that host links to files on
your service (referrals) or when you reward known pirates even after,
literally, hundreds of valid takedown notices against their files.

------
ghshephard
So, that's a business that shuts down gracefully. They clearly identify their
last date, and, continue to serve a useful function (for their customers, at
least) right up until that date. They even continue to take new customer
business right up to 30 days prior to their last day of business.

"Kindly note that RapidShare will stop the active service on March 31st, 2015.
Extensions of STANDARD PLUS and PREMIUM will be possible until February 28th,
2015."

~~~
Paul12345534
This isn't exactly a graceful shutdown. The majority of their files were
already deleted in the past on very short notice. I have no idea who still
used or trusted their service.

------
throwaway75394
I've interviewed an ex rapidshare employee some time ago. Might have been just
one disgruntled ex employee, but they told me the CEO wouldn't hand out access
to the servers to anyone and insisted on keep doing that himself and other
stuff.

They weren't competent though, so maybe he just didn't want to give that
employee access. I asked them what they did at Rapidshare and the only answer
I got was "multicore stuff" (sic).

However it seemed inviteable, Rapidshare tried to rebrand to a personal cloud
storage provider without providing the features needed to be one while still
cracking down on piracy. Maybe they should have pulled a dotcom, shut
rapidshare down and announce rapid. And then stick to the old business model.

~~~
caractacus
They also refused to change their name. The founder wouldn't rebrand. They had
a decent chance, if you think about it: storage know-how, a bunch of servers,
some good techies, and - which could have been the killer - a Swiss location
with Swiss data privacy laws, right in the Snowden era. Forget Dropbox and
google drive and amazon with the NSA tapping into them here and wherever.
Could have been a great selling point. But the owner couldn't face
'swissshare' or 'swissbox' or something else... had to keep Rapidshare with
all that implied.

------
Paul12345534
Rapidshare shafted their paid users long ago (announcing the deletion of files
on short notice) then they came back with a business model that was not
exactly well thought-out.

------
aravan
I was doing research on anti-piracy, torrent kills all the file sharing portal
more than government. File share portals comes directly under law of
punishment for hosting and sharing infringed content. Torrent is a general
public, mass, there could be many ways to protect innocence against strict
law. Hoping that rapidshare made enough money, may try to leave the shit off
and spend their time on vocation.

These all hall of fame, rise and fall of empire, giving way innovations and
technologies.

------
gsam
Rapidshare links have continuously died whether they were legit or not for a
long while. Sure, a lot of it was illegitimate, but people simply moved on.

------
jorjordandan
I like the "187,864 users trusted rapidshare in the last hour" in the bottom
left corner of the announcement...nice touch lol

------
adrianlmm
Anyone remember those hard to figure out capchas Rapidshare had? specially the
cats.

------
JDL2
Hi,

I came across this thread whilst searching for info on File Hosting and
there's certainly a lot of good information here.

I'm writing an app that uploads small documents to public file hosting sites
(e.g. via REST-HTTP Post) so that others can download them again, preferably
via simple HTTP GET.

Rather than coding to a particular API for each and every Hosting site, are
there any public code libraries (preferably C++ or C#) that do this already
presenting a common API across a number of different supported hosting sites?

Ideally I'd be looking for an Apache/MIT license code rather than GNU.

------
DigitalSea
Is anyone else here surprised that Rapidshare is still even a thing and lasted
this long in the face of Mediashare, Megaupload, Zippyshare and all those
other sites? I haven't seen a Rapidshare link shared in a very long time.

I remember once upon a time if you downloaded leaked music or even software,
then Rapidshare was the go to site for that kind of thing. Funny how things
change.

~~~
Shorel
For me the service to use was eDonkey/eMule. You could find anything there.

Nowadays it's mostly torrents.

------
gtirloni
Reminds me of Xoom [1]. It's very hard to pivot a legit business when you're
basically know as the best place to download pirated software/music/games.

[1]
-[http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/h...](http://web.archive.org/web/19990515000000*/http://xoom.com/home)

------
RayLau135
I completely forgot about RapidShare till I saw this, I'm probably not the
only one...

~~~
redlotus
LOL me too. I have switched to torrent since megaupload was banned.

------
ing33k
imo they failed to adopt to the Cloud Model . one interesting company which I
think pivoted form being a similar site to cloud/backup space is Mediafire

[http://www.mediafire.com/](http://www.mediafire.com/)

------
jafingi
It actually happened later than I would have thought. Rapidshare built their
entire brand around warez uploading and piracy, so when they changed their
concept to please anti-pirate organizations, it was just a matter of time.

------
giancarlostoro
I'm surprised they never adopted to the cloud model of their competitors such
as Dropbox, surely they would of had the resources (at least the hardware) to
compete. Such a shame.

------
onderkalaci
RapidShare was my childhood hero!

I think appearance of google drive/dropbox is the main reason of this. People
easily share data with them.

------
arcticf0x
I remember it being the pirate king in the old days. Won't miss it much now.

------
rosstex
Good, their new premium features shut out large treasures of content on the
web.

------
pje
goodnight sweet prince/and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

~~~
RankingMember
Many memories of waiting for their little countdown timer to finish so I could
click the "Free download" link, switching to another tab during the countdown,
and then forgetting to come back in time before the download link became stale
and having to do it all over again.

------
Chirael
Back to BBSs?

------
curiously
man I had the most amazing time with Rapidshare during the 2007~2009 era. I
remember being in an all you can eat candy store. Same with megaupload. Stuff
you couldn't find anywhere were popping up, old vintage rare tv shows, games,
magazines. The monetary incentive provided an explosion of content you
couldn't get elsewhere.

I will really miss the golden era of filehosting services.

~~~
dajohnson89
There should be a public list of cool stuff on RapidShare. That way, people
can sift through all the pr0n/Disney movies and start archiving this stuff in
a distributed sense. That way, the artifacts aren't lost forever.

~~~
RayLau135
There was load of blog sites which kept posting up new stuff with links back
to Rapidshare in the footer, but older page just ended up have dead links as
the content got deleted.

------
pekk
We could assume that Rapidshare got shut down because of evil copyright blah
blah...

Or maybe they just couldn't compete with Dropbox et al.

~~~
hueving
Well it's both. Copyright crap eliminates the market they were in. Then they
were forced to compete in a different market with established players (e.g
Dropbox)

------
mostafaberg
To me Rapidshare was a very shady place to be full of warez, never visited,
never cared. good riddance

------
mirimir
It's not that hard to create a Tor hidden service, locally or on a VPS or
hosted server. And using OnionShare
<[https://onionshare.org/>](https://onionshare.org/>) it's trivial.

