Slashdot Mirror
The Tragedy of the Digital Commons
Frog writes "The New York Times (reg. req'd) writes about a study by the Xerox PARC Internet Ecologies Area which shows that only a small percentage of Gnutella users actually share files -- the rest just take 'em. The researchers note it's 'hard to generate spontaneous cooperation in large anonymous groups.' As a consequence, the system has degraded performance, and is more vulnerable to censorship or legal action. Maybe the solution is to implement a market system for resource allocation, but how to prevent cheating?" Reminds me of the BBS days of file ratios - 'course then we'd just take an image, resize and upload it, so that idea didn't exactly work as intended.
filesharing shouldnt be forced and anyway, gnutella hosts 20+ TB of files right now...yep thats terabytes. just like the old bbs days more and more people will share files if they cant find what theyre looking for and the system will keep growing. its no biggie - gnutella can be censored simply by injecting garbage into the system which is what flatplanet tried to do. freenet on the other hand...
I think that faster net access would make it easier to share data instead of just downloading it.
My connection is slow enough that I can not share anything, but I would if I had DSL or Cablemodem access.
C'mon people! Do you really think that this is any shock? I could have told you that people would rather receive than give. Especially when it is anonymous.
I think a ratio type of thing would be a great idea, but how in the world can this be done? Obviously this is not too practicle in an anonymous situation; so is this the great paradox of anonymous vs quality?
In other words, if it is purely anonymous as many would insist it to be, then it will lack quality and usability by nature. So in order to have good quality, you have to sacrifice security?
Can anyone think of a better way?
One of the reasons at least I don't share my stuff is because I am scared the feds will come after me ! You know downloading is less illegal than actually distributing - difference between buying drugs and selling them. Also, some people use computers at office to do all this stuff - definitely don't want to get into legal trouble there !
...Is that, by default, whenever you download something, it's shared (at least, as far as I recall). So that if users just don't move it out of the download directory, they are sharing it... This is how files spread through the network. If gnutella doesn't do this (and I don't think it does), then that will of course lower the amount of users sharing, because the casual user will not go out of their way to enable it.
Josh Sisk
The article notes that if someone (such as the RIAA) were to sue, they wouldn't go after the individual users, but rather the big fishes.
However, if Napster were to be shut down for good, it would inject a surge of "survival instinct" into the whole operation and everyone would start sharing files -- If there's something to rebel against, people will rebel against it.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
I'd expect there to be more downloads than uploads, unless the type of content is something which everyone can produce easily -- and how useful would such content tend to be?
Founder's Camp
Founder's Camp
News for non-Nerds. Stuff that matters.
Of course I'd need to sit down and think for a while to work out how to apply a cryptographic system of checks and balances to something like Gnutilla. It's an interesting problem.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Reminds me of the BBS days of file ratios
The reason it reminds you of this is because it is exactly the same thing. The difference is that in the bad old days, the average BBS would only have one phone line, and the leeches could tie it up 30-60 minutes each. Now there are bandwidth leeches, sucking up the limited bandwidth of cable TV modems, and are the reason for upload bandwidth caps. The bandwidth leeches are a large fraction of the top 20%, and the traditional leeches are the bottom 70%.
'course then we'd just take an image, resize and upload it, so that idea didn't exactly work as intended.
The really high tech leeches of the day came up with a slick trick: "Leech Zmodem". When it received the last block of a file, it would NAK it, asking to restart the transmission near the beginning of the file, then cancel the download. Most BBS Zmodem implementations would only debit the leech with the point at which the download was canceled, if it debited their download quota at all!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The somewhat mandatory sharing of files with Napster is a good thing IMO. While you can hide them, or be a jerk and put your bandwidth down at 28.8 to discourage sharing, eventually you learn to love sharing. And isn't that what sharing is really about? Love? Hmm, I really wish I could some sort of love-sharing device IRL. Would really enlarge my self-esteem (among other things).
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
What CmdrTaco said about file ratios is pretty accurate. I ran a BBS for several years and found this to be true.
It was also true for Post/Call ratios when implemented on some boards (ie, not letting the user play LORD until he has reached a Post/call ratio of 1, or whatever). This basically created a message base full of crappy 1-line posts (also true on some web-based forums where users with X posts are rewarded with a special 'ranking').
When you install Napster, it automatically creates an index of every MP3 on your system, and starts sharing from the second you connect to the server. It also doesn't exit if you merely click the Windows "X" button; that only minimizes it to the tray (!). This keeps Napster going on high-speed persistent connections, like those at universities where it's very popular.
Gnutella is too nice. It doesn't automatically share every media file on your system unless you tell it to specifically, and it exits when you say so. Most people don't mess around with configuration settings. Napster's defaults benefit Napster. Gnutella's defaults benefit the user who wants control. Guess who wins.
For more information, click here.
Gnutella and Gnotella (even with the skins) still have kind of crabby user interfaces, whereas Napster beta 7 has a funky tree thing to say what you're sharing. I'm sure that's partly to blame.
Another problem is that ''56K'' modems have a maximum 33.6kbps user-to-ISP bandwidth, it does somewhat hurt your downloading prowess to have people sucking up all your ACK-ing bandwidth.
People with the broadband connections don't seem to mind sharing, so I guess this will fix itself.
Also, around the time of the hearing for Napster when things looked bleak, Gnutella fell to its knees; it was very hard to get a reasonable connection without listing a dozen peers. There's something wrong with that there scaleability!
-Andy
I noticed that sharing seems to be a late "feature" in many clients. For example, the last version of Knapster I used and (I believe) the last version of gtk-gnutella I used both did not yet support uploading. In fact, the clients may never support it, and people may not want to upgrade to a new version that does. This is always going to be the least demanded feature, and since these types of services lend themselves to a plethora of Yet Another (tm) clients, this could be a significant problem.
The third party software is to blame. Sadly enough many clients don't even support file sharing, and almost all don't default to filesharing. This is because third party developers aren't regulated and encouraged to share. If I recall correctly the napster corporation (company?) has certain restrictions on napster clones, that they try to enforce.
Joseph Elwell.
Programmers know this as the "90/10" rule: 90% of the useful work will be done by 10% of the code
This applies to people as well. I helped organize keggers in college. A small number of us did the organizing/financing/clean up -- everyone else just showed up and partied. That was kind of the whole point. So this "ecology" result is NOT a tragedy of the commons, it' just a another keg party - and you know how hard those are to stop 8)
GO GNUTELLA
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
The tragedy of the commons was inevitable in these cases, and solving the problem is what Mojo Nation was designed for. It uses a micropayments system which is denominated in digital resources (disk space, bandwidth, CPU time) and exchanged for services. This is just a micropayment system that is backed by the old upload/download credits of the BBS days.
Check it out at http://www.mojonation.net/
Don't dismiss file ratios as a legitimate means of submission encouragement. Yes, the system can be abused, but after years of BBS hopping I've seen excellent methods to prevent it.
My favorite method involved an account system, whereby uploads that other members voted as 'spam' or just worthless space were counted against that user. Upload enough crap and you're booted; add a two-day account activation delay and even the most 'disciplined' media hog is curtailed.
Of course, a ratio of both file size and number of files is necessary, else you'll get people uploading one worthless 1GB file every few days, and then going to town before they're booted.
Now, these systems worked fine with one server, but systems like Napster and Gnutella present a new paradigm. How to enforce ratios when there is really no such thing as an 'upload'? A few ideas, based more on the general concept of user-controlled servers than any specific service's setup:
* For every file downloaded off a user's server, give that user a point. Servers can set a score limit on their machine for downloads (i.e. 'only people with a score of 100 can download from me'). Drop by a point or two for each download, but give 100 points or so when you sign up.
* Same system as above, but base on file size instead of number of downloads. Or perhaps a combination of the two?
* Keep track of everything on some centralized computer, and enforce the ratio much like it would be in days of lore.
* Enforce a per-server ratio, the setup of which is determined by the owner. Not a great system on this scale, but worth a look.
* Rather than 'earning' downloads, penalize users who download too much too fast with a negative score. Doesn't take into account whether or not they serve, though...
And, of course, what will probably happen in the end anyways:
* Keep the system as it is now. As the bandwith dissappears, all the hosers who don't know how to share will leave, and all the savvy slashdot readers and linux lovers will get their connection speeds back.
Any other ideas for control systems, or arguments against them?
I guess the obvious conclusion is that people will not give away, only take from free sources. But then how do you explain napster? Even though I routinly hear that the quality of music is garbage ("it's all brittany spears and crap like that") I've found a wider range of music there than any other place I've ever been. From The Why Store to Bach and plenty of it.
I think it's a little early to declare gnutella in trouble, just wait till napster gets shut down, then watch the flood migrate over there.
Finkployd
So some questions might be: Is it a greater "sin" in the eyes of most people to download copyrighted material, or to make your own such material available? Who would the RIAA or MPAA choose to go after? When you click on a file, don't you find out the IP address of the source so you can connect there?
Just a few things to think about...
Anonimity definitely has a dark side.
A few years ago, Time magazine did an excellent piece on the problems to today's society. One of the things they pointed out is that the privacy of a modern household has greatly increased the incidents of child abuse. In the society that we evolved in, one large factor that stopped people from abusing their child was the fact that there was no privacy--if you abuse your child, the whole village knew about it.
The anonimity of the internet causes similar problems.
Any system administrator knows that if they put any pornographic images on their web server, their machine or their machine's connection will quickly get overloaded. For example, one of my users put up pictures of attractive women. The women were not even naked, yet the server's connection was still overloaded.
I have heard it said that the most common term asked for in the leading search engines is "pornography". People who would normally be too embarassed to go in to a liquor store or a peep show have no problem getting porno on the net. The internet makes people do what they would not normally do.
While pornography is somewhat harmless, other activity on the internet isn't. The actions of the anonymous person who brought down Kiro5hin come to mind. As does the random bannings on many IRC channels (where the operators as often as not broke in to accounts or engaged in credit card fraud to get a system they could run a bot on to control the channel), the efforts people go to to cheat in online games, countless breakin attempts any experienced system administrator sees in their logs, the nonstop tide of spam, and so on. All of these are things that poeple do when they do not get a chance to look in the eyes of the person who they are harming with their selfish actions.
It does not surprise me that the internet is full of people who take but do not give back. Human nature has always had the takers who complain when the stuff they are not taking is not good enough for their selfish purposes, and the givers who get little in return for their giving except complaints from the takers. The anonimity of the internet makes this problem worse.
Anyway, that is my rant of the day. Time to go back to coding my current open-source project.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
> I think a ratio type of thing would be a great
> idea, but how in the world can this be done?
It has already been done. The Mojo Nation system was designed as a way for people to exchange services using a micropayment system. This system is different from other micropayment systems because the "coins" are backed in digital resources. It is like the old upload and download ratios of BBS days. You contribute services to the system by "selling" to others and when you need services you "buy" them from other agents. Toss in a distributed, de-centralized data sharing services and you have a pretty cool little item. The coins are like tokens at an arcade, except those who contribute more than they consume end up with a surplus they might be able to sell later; greed is a powerful motivation to get people to
Cheating is controlled (or at least minimized) by using market-based mechanisms like reputations. By basing the service on something like a market it is possible for distrustful parties to conduct transactions and exchange services. Look around at any stable social structure and you will see a lot of the same techniques employed to fairly allocate resources and control parasites and cheaters.
jim mccoy
I don't really see what the problem is.. The internet, by its very nature is parasitic. That is, its comprised largely from takers, rather than givers. Its an environement set up for people to inhale information without any sort of group correspondance. Gnutella (and Napster, i'd bet) is no different than the rest of the internet. The number of leeches outweighs the number of contributors by at least 100 to 1.
Thats the nature of things. Doesn't make it evil, or bad, or wrong to leech. Thats just the shape of things. The only thing bad about it, is that some of us get tired of looking at the same pablum every day, and try and improve things by lending a hand.
The whole Linux community is an example of this..Look where that got us..We've all been had, basically....Tens of thousands of people use yours and my work freely, and physically contribute nothing in return. Its a parasitic process by design. People are building their careers based off the work you've done for free.
Just stating the obvious, imho.
My $0.02,
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Ahh, file ratios.
An anecdote:
I was too honest to rename files, but didn't have a worthy collection to upload to keep my ratios up. Finally, in what I thought was surely a nasty trick, I uploaded a collection of short stories I had written, one by one (all dreck - because everything written when you're fifteen is dreck).
Imagine my surprise at returning to the board weeks later to find a story I had deleted from my archive for being exceptionally lame marked as a sysop-preferred download.
The moral:
One man's trash is another's treasure
-or-
Fifteen year old boys are as bad judges of writing as fifteen year old girls are writers
-or-
At least file ratios get things out there that might otherwise stayed buried (even if maybe they should have).
-- I'm not evil, I'm
When I ran my board I had to approve every file before a user got credit.
When I ran my Hotline server though, I left it up and running with leech access enabled and I had something like 500 d/ls with 0 u/ls over a 4 hour period. I then had to switch to an account based system. So few people uploaded anything that after a few weeks I took the server down. I was using an ISDN line and it wasn't worth wasting my monthly hours for people to leech off of me.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
There are two solutions, I think, to the tragedy of the commons. One is to pay people for their disk space and bandwidth. As several other comments have pointed out, this is exactly what Mojo Nation does, using "mojo" micropayment tokens as the currency. I've been playing with it, and though it's been a bumpy ride, it looks very promising. Check it out.
:)
There is another solution, I think, which is using trust to define a community. The set of "Gnutella users" is too large and diffuse to actually define a community. Why should I donate my bandwidth for other people who I don't know and don't really care about?
If, on the other hand, I were sharing files with a much smaller group of people, many of whom I know personally, then it starts feeling more like a community. Of course I want my friends to be able to listen to the music I like.
I propose that the trust system as deployed on Advogato might be a good way to define these communities. Of course, I might be totally wrong about this as well. Only one way to find out
Incidentally, the way Mojo Nation is set up right now, it still has Tragedy of the Commons problems. Currently, you don't get mojo for uploading tasty content. In fact, you actually have to pay for the privilege. However, when you share a file, it's not a continual drain on your bandwidth (or diskspace, fwiw). The actual distribution is handled by "block servers", who do charge for their services.
Of course, the Mojo economy is still in its formative stages. I hope, and expect, that actual markets will develop for providing and identifying tasty content.
In any case, file sharing sure promises to be an interesting ride.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
We used to paraphrase Marx's
"From each according to his ability,
to each according to his need."
into
"From each according to their assets,
to each according to their greed."
Of course, this was in our godless commie Warez swappin' Hotline-usin' phase...
In the long run, it's OK. There are 90% leeches. But the 10% who make up the providers is not always the same 10% of the people. Today's leech is tomorrow's provider, and vice versa. Sometimes.
It all tends to work out eventually.
-
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
If you look at some of the host data that gets passed around, you will note that a few hosts are reporting back share sizes of a couple of terabytes. You can see this effect when connecting to the network as the total share size may instantly jump several terabytes. As a result, you simply cannot trust this number. I would put the total share size between four and seven terabytes - no small number, but nowhere near 20TB.
ian.
ian
That just shows you that the entire thing is a fad, and when it dies out, the whole Napster lawsuit will just have been a small bump in everyone's collective memory. These things come and go... we've had BBS's, FTP sites, IRC, Hotline servers, and now Napster, Gnutella, Scour, et all.
They come and go, as the fad takes em. And the whole reason why they go stale is that users take more than they give. DUH. So eventually the people with the fat pipelines that were giving so much get sick of giving and want stuff in return. And as soon as they go to the "membership" model or the "ratio" model, it quickly gets abused or the majority of people leave, giving you a select membership only service (which is what most hotline servers are now). Then again, you still have great places like #macfilez... but those places are becoming fewer and further between.
Napster will die, same with Scour and Gnutella... lets just see how long they stay around. And again, everyone that's really into pirating will stay with their favorite IRC site, FTP site, or BBS. All of the other's that were recently introduced to the fine art of pirating will get sick of Napster and attempt to learn IRC but will find it too difficult to use so they'll give up and start going back to buying CDs and nothing will change.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I remember back in my college days. we had set up a "kiosk" of 3 pc's in the processing department that along with access to UUnet there was a huge (500 megabyte) file sharing database. users could walk in and use floppies to get what they needed and upload that which was useable by all. when we went online we loaded the thing up with gobs and gobs of shareware, tons of free documents and along with the UUnet connection lots of cool things.. We also kept close track of the users activities (No username attached it was all anon access) for the Phyc grad-students that were researching basic human though patterns when exposed to the digital information age. Well there was a ratio of 900 to 1. of every 900 items downloaded there was 1 item uploaded (and usually by one of us maintainers via modem)
people are greedy, they take and take and take. and WILL NOT give. need proof of that statement? look at the fact that there are starving people in the USA. There is absolutely NO reason for anyone in the USA to go hungry, without shelter.. yet it happenes because of GREED.
Every pattern we found on that Kiosk matched the Phyc patterns they had with people giving cheritably..
Face it, Homo-sapiens are self centered greedy weenies. And that is one of the first things that will be seen by any sentient visitor.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There are plenty. Visit http://gnutella.wego.com and check out the third party clones. The gnutella 0.56 isn't even supported anymore, so if you are running that, stop, and get something new. Toadnode (win) is a quick up-and-comer.
The program is called Gnucleus. It offers the option to allow or deny a result based on:
- IP address (frustrated by searches that return reserved IPs? No longer!!)
.HTM files? No problem!)
You can sub-search or filter your search results. You can run multiple searches at once. It even lets you throttle things, although I haven't tried that feature myself. @Home throttles things just fine all by itself.File type (don't want those damn
So, the source is out there on SourceForge. If these features aren't in the Linux realm yet, porting should be a simple matter (I'd hope.)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
because they're *lazy*
Personally, I'm sticking to USENET, where I've run into a core group of regulars who have similarly eclectic tastes, and I don't have to worry about seeing slow servers or MP3s that are cut off at the end.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Granted, I was on a 10 mbit line, but the point remains. If there was a way to limit the number of outgoing files by bandwidth, or number of connections, or something, I would share files.
Files that you download are not shared by default.
Let me say that again : Files that you download, with Gnutella, are not shared by default.
Which means that, regardless of what people might say, Gnutella is not, by default, from a practical standpoint, a peer-to-peer network. It's just like any other client-server network - the clients take and the servers give. It takes work to be a server, even if it's 20 seconds of work in copying files and clicking rescan, and most people are short-sighted nitwits who don't realize they need to do that and wouldn't care if they did.
At the very least, files you download on Gnutella network should be shared by default. I think, if it's supposed to be a peer-to-peer network, then sharing should be the default behavior, and not sharing an option. If you download a file and the file you have is the same length as the source (it's finished) then the file should be shared.
I'm feeling like enough of a jerk right now to say that it should be shared regardless of where it is put on the hard drive. Gnutella should keep track of the stuff it's downloaded (Stolen Album-Stolen Song 1.mp3, Stolen Album-Stolen Song 2.mp3) and search your hard drive for those files, and offer them to the net if they are found. What part of "peer-to-peer" do you not understand?
I don't use Gnutella anymore. It's not what it was said to be. I think of a hundred thousand users who can't even be bothered to put thier incomings in thier outgoing directory, and decide not to bother with it.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Instead of trying to send a 3Mb file up a puny 33.6 connection to the net Mojo Nation is designed to break the file up into lots of small pieces so that you ask 300 servers for for a little piece of data; the design was created to take advantage of the assymetric nature of current network connections. Users have less upstream bandwidth than downstream bandwidth, by splitting the load for sending data across lots of hosts Mojo Nation can minimize the impact on any single peer and still be able to deliver high bitrate downloads through the larger downstream side of the connection.
jim
anybody remember good old HSLINK from the "old days?" I never learned how it worked, but it somehow managed to magically allow you to upload and download from a BBS simultaneously with no apparent loss of bandwidth. It was really great for ratios :)
Anyone know how it worked? If only some kind of equivalent existed for the 'net.. hehehe
Can your IM do this?
And in any case, what's wrong with that? Evolution is very efficient at weeding out people who are not interested in sex.
I suspect it will also be efficient at weeding out people who are excessively interested in streams of numbers as substitutes for mates.
Can you honestly say that you think that people who search for "sex" on the internet actually have more sex in real life?
Of course, one might argue that driving down birth rates is a good thing...
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
I use gnut and set it to allow cacheing of frequently searched for files on my system. Every now and again I clear out some of the more objectionable stuff (surprisingly little of this actually), move some items into my permanent share directory and let it the cache repopulate.
It's fascinating to see what arrives, to the extent that I rarely search for anything, just check the cache and see if anything interesting has turned up overnight.
(This happens to bug me personally because he claims to have been the first to observe that the tragedy of the commons problem applies to Internet congestion. He wasn't; I was, in 1985. See RFC970)
As a previous poster noted, the default with Gnutella is not to share anything. That's why so few share. This isn't rocket science.
Many user may be at work or some other place where may makethere may be a policy against Napster and Gnutella, or at least the fear that they could get in trouble if caught by a sysadmin. Therefore, they get in, grab what they want, and get out.
Limits of the average PC. Including low bandwidth and limited storage space. Its harder downloading stuff if people are uploading at the same time. Combine this with the fact that not only a small percent of people on the 'net have always-on connections and fewer of those probably leave their computers on all the time, and its not difficult to understand why there are only 10% of the people who share but don't query. And I don't know what the average user does after downloading a song, but I either toss it away after listening to it a few times or burn it to CD, primarily to save space on my computer. In either case, I couldn't share it easily again if I wanted to. Granted, hard drive space is dirt cheap, but how many older computers are still out there, and how much space does the average computer (not the average Slashdot reader) have? (I have a 2 year old PII with about 3 GB of space. And my MP3s have to compete with Unreal Tournament and those other space-hogging games and apps.)
Guilt. Its one thing to quickly grab a couple of songs you want, but to share out a bunch of stuff you feel more like a pirate. Granted, I could care less if Brittany Spears gets another nickel from her music, but I've never downloaded her stuff or bought a CD. And the record companies can go to heck. But my favorite artists aren't millionaires or superstars, and I hate to think of them getting ripped off because of something I'm doing. I can justify my own downloads by making sure that I support them in any other way I can, but the guy downloading their song from my machine might just be some jerk who could care less. . . .
And finally, in an slightly off topic rant, my pet gripe about Napster (other than it's actually a pretty cruddy piece of software) and Gnutella (which I haven't used as much), is that there's no opportunity for discovery. When I share music with my friends in the real world (aka off-line), its more on the lines of "hey, I found this really cool new group", than "here, have a copy of this one track by this artist you already know". Napster is definitely designed for finding something very very specific and little else. To me, sharing is passing on something new to someone, that they may not have found on their own, which means that Napster isn't really my idea of sharing. . . .
Of course, you never passed the beer around recursively either. If you had, you might be just a wee bit more skeptical.
The main flaw with GNUtella, as I see it, is its recursive design. Though few people seem willing to bring this point up, it simply CANNOT scale reasonably. It simply could never support napster's load, or even a fraction thereof.
In short, GNUtella is reasonably acceptable for little splinters of "networks". I could see loose knit warez groups/associatons of, say, 50-200 users forming around it. However, this kind of instability and decentralization does not lend itself to use by the vast majority of people who are technically inept.
Compared to other sites on the internet, this may be true, but I've found tons of stuff impossible to find on napster--even stuff that I could buy at any major CD chain.
content of any sort (audio, video, text, sculpture, etc.) has always existed for the sole purpose of being consumed. It's not a surprise that digital content is being slurped at a rate far exceeding its creation - the digital medium is what facilitates that content being distributed more effeciently than ever before possible.
The analogy to a "commons" is a false analogy. A commons is a resource that is shared by a community. For example, a grassy area where you graze your cattle, or the air we breathe, or Social Security. If a system is not used to regulate how users donate and withdraw from the commons, the commons WILL collapse because short term private advantage (eat all the grass) is always more attractive than long-term common gain (ensure grass is there for your cattle for the next hundred years, for the whole village).
Napster, Gnutella, etc are NOT a commons at all. They are a content distribution system, where a elite set of users (Britney Spears, people with large hard drives or great bandwidth, etc) provide content to a system of users. A better analogy is a museum - the public comes in to access the content (in this case, sculpture, archaeological ruins, etc.) which was provided by a elite (the original cultures who built the structures, Indiana Jones who saved it from Belloch, the city of New York and the MoMA...)
given that content is very difficult to produce, and then also difficult to distribute (and don't forget that the sole reason content exists is for distribution. NBC doesn't seal filmed episodes of Survivor in a cave, it broadcasts them, for example).
its important not to gloss over what a "commons" really is because there really are a LOT of commons' out there which we desperately need to regulate better. Lumping in Napster and Gnutella is a mistake because it dilutes the idea of a commons, and also sets unreasonable metrics of success for these new systems to be measured against. The exaggerated upload/download ratio is not a sign of failure but rather one of triumph.
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Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
Has nothing to do with being a leech or a jerk or anything, but rather with the way Gnutella (or at least the version I have) works/is programmed. You see, the beauty and the curse of Gnutella is that, unlike Napster, it turns everyone's computer into their own server. Which is great for avoiding the fate that may befall Napster and other centralized databases, except that it means that each computer must do a string search through its own database of shared files with each search request made to the system. The way I set up Gnutella originally, that meant searching through a couple thousand files a couple hundred times a second. Furthermore, unlike Napster, that version of Gnutella didn't have the option to limit the number of simultaneous downloads from your system--thus, I would have 20 or more people downloading from me at a time, all whilst I may or may not have been downloading.
The upshot of all this is, Gnutella makes your computer act like a real file server, and most people's computers aren't cut out for that. I don't know if it was a bug in that particular version of Gnutella (Win32, 0.52) or what, but it was causing my system to seriously chug. As in, CPU utilization at 100%. I couldn't play MP3s without serious skipping, couldn't browse the web without noticable slowdowns. Even my system clock started running slow!
Now, it could have just been my system, and it could have been a bug which has since been fixed, but it was seriously unacceptable. Since then I've used Gnutella much much less, and often decide not to share when I do (or I share a smaller folder).
It does not have anything to do with my not being willing to share, or being a freeloader. If this is an inherent limitation of the way Gnutella distributes its file serving, then the problem will go away soon with more powerful computers; if (more likely) it was just an implementation bug, it is probably fixed by now. In fact, I think I'll go check...
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Having the same directory for downloads and sharing typically leads to a lot of unfinished, broken files to be shared and redistributed. This leads to quite a bit of frustration... So this is not a good idea. Unfortunately, Gnutella (the Win32 client) allows for the download directory to be shared. There are even some of the typical zero-length message files distributed in Gnutella that ask everyone not to share their download directory. FURI, one of the good Gnutella clients, appends .dl to files while they are being downloaded so that everybody will see something is wrong with the file.
I'm sure that a good portion of the MP3 and other trading communities will lart me for this, especially #mp3files and other like-minded groups, but I'd like to stand on the wooden box and pronounce:
Ratios are good.
They're not great; as with any system, they are bound to be abused, and no system (no, not even Slashdot's hairy moderation system) will be free of abuse.
Sharing thrives because people always have something to share. And sites grow because their collections grow. And their collections will grow as contributions are made. It follows that a site which gets contributions from its users will grow faster, and ostensibly, get better.
I've run FTP sites in the past that were essentially anonymous. I almost got run out of certain IRC channels and newsgroups on a rail because I decided, on and off, to make that server a ratio server.
For me, I liked ratio sites, because they always seemed to have better selections of items. On some sites that weren't ratio, I still uploaded. Plus, I had plenty of obscure items that I wanted to spread, so not only was I contributing to the quality of the site, I was also exposing site admins to new things, and increasing the availability of those items.
In the FTP arena, a lot of sharing problems just came from a simple lack of respect. Many 33.6 modem pups would initiate a dozen or so connections at once, all multitasking among each other, and let them sit, say overnight or while they were out. Then I would have this chode sitting on my site, eating up a login slot, crawling away at 0.4 kB/s or less. I would normally kill these connections on sight once they got that low. It's simply a show of disrespect. There's no reason why you can't (with the right clients) arrange these transfers so that they go sequentially instead of simultaneously. At 33.6 you can download a meg in about 3 mins. A 4-5 MB file then takes 12-15 minutes. That's acceptable. But 1-2 hours or more is not. I had much more respect for those visitors who were giving my site the respect of not leeching at ignorantly slow speeds.
Ratio sites are also ALWAYS available -- it keeps the disrespectful leeches away. I never had a problem finding a login slot on a ratio server. On a leech server, forget it. You could try to hit it all day, and basically you were in a massive race condition with goodness knows how many other #mp3files lurkers. This is assuredly why so many noteworthy leech FTP sites then died a horrible death -- to the dismay of all those leech-dependent trading pups.
Once I went to ratio, of course, I would start to get a fair amount of total crap. Not just dupes, which were annoying, but out-and-out crap -- like 15 minute long news reports taped off radio encoded at 44.1 / 128 or more. Not only did the disrespect of uploading these files get my goat, but the sheer braindeadness of encoding such large, worthless files just to use as ratio cloggers when it would be just as easy to encode and upload worthwhile stuff.
But this didn't encourage me to turn off ratios, because I would always ban those IPs (zones if necessary) after looking through the logs, and because for every ratio revolutionary, there was at least one visitor who uploaded something worthwhile. And the fact that there people out there who respected my site, and were honestly interested in trading, made me keep my site up as long as I could. (Eventually, I had two logins; a ratio login, and a leech login with limited downloadable selection.)
I started a server not only so I could spit stuff out into the trading (i.e. leeching) community. I started it so I could also get back from that community. It was give and take, not just take, take, take. Leech sites only work in theory -- they have crap, they're overloaded, and they almost never grow. Their admins eventually get discouraged, and turn away from the trading community altogether.
It burns me to see people out there on Napster who don't share anything they have. They should at least have the common decency to set their sharing directory to an empty dir, if they are going to drop max DLs to 0. That's just disrespectful. And they don't deserve any respect back.
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Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Guilty as charged.
It's just that when I was a godless commie Warez swappin' Hotline-usin' no-good SOB, I was also a otherly-grammared, politically correct phraseologist.
Now that I'm a godless Corporatist profiteering flak, I am once again a grammar pedant. I use apostrophes correctly (even with the word "its" versus "it's"), I attempt to preserve voice whenever possible, and I never say "quote" when I mean "quotation."
Grammar is just another natural transition engendered by such a political shift; others are exemplified by driving a Porsche Boxster instead of a '69 Volvo Stationwagon, dating a woman named Elizabeth instead of one named Sunshine, and drinking dry martinis instead of Ernest & Julio jug wine.
OK. I admit it. Even with all those changes, I'm still a godless commie Warez swappin' Hotline-usin' no-good SOB. So sue me.
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bukra fil mish mish
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Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Gnutella is like the Beggars in Spain, no limits... put some files up, and every byte of bandwidth will be sucked out of your line.
I tried it, and whenever I put something up (like some Tangerine Dream concert bootlegs in MP3 format), a few maniacs with unlimited bandwidth start multiple downloads till my internet connection is completely overloaded.
Until there are options in Gnutella to limit the number of connections per user, and total bandwidth used, I'll opt out (as will most others who want to actually use their internet connection for other things besides Gnutella).
nt
The shareholder is always right.