tbh it’s not really necessary today because there are so many ways to share files. Additionally, the distributed network has major disadvantages:
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No meaningful reputation. If you download software from a file-sharing service you’re taking a huge risk.
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Ease of use. It’s a pain in the ass to new users, which means it doesn’t thrive the way it needs to.
And the advantages aren’t what they once were. There’s so many sites nowadays and it’s so easy to set one up that being resistant to takedowns isn’t worth the trade-off.
Most likely this incident is an indirect result of that coup. After that, they had to rapidly replenish the mod team and didn’t have time to vet people, so they ended up with someone like this.
FWIW my recollection from looking over sunbothersco at the time was that they were a clout-seeker with no meaningful history on /r/piracy - they were repeatedly and aggressively asking to be made top mod of a wide variety of subs at the time, with no real connection between them. It sucks that reddit was forcing out top mods, but I wish they’d at least followed through on their threat to make it democracy, since there’s no way we would have ended up with someone like that if the system had been anything but “randomly hand the sub to whoever asks first and loudest.”