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.

Comments

*shrug*

[Zurk]

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...

Slow connection makes sharing hard

[cs668]

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.

And this is some suprise?

[Dman33]

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?

Re:And this is some suprise?

[don_carnage]

Can anyone think of a better way?

I think CS668 (further down in the post) has a pretty good sense of what's happening: There are still a whole lot of people out there that are still on 56K connections. Cause and effect: people don't want to waste their time with a 4k/second host when they can download 4 files from a DSL or Cable host at 20k/sec each instead.

--

Vulnerable?

[don_carnage]

"As a consequence, the system has degraded performance, and is more vulnerable to censorship or legal action."

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.

--

Partly due to broadband haves and have nots

[ibot]

Because of the fact that more people have lower speed connections (mostly dial up), they are likely to stay online only as long as it takes to download a large file. Anyway who'd be interested in downloading from a source that can channel only a few kilobytes a minute.

Founder's Camp

This might be a solution.

[Apuleius]

Mojonation seems to address this problem. From their site:

Micropayments and Scalability Mojo Nation compensates users who provide the resources, content, and indexing services. Effectively preventing cheating, denial of service, and freeloading, Mojo Nation fosters an information market for all types of content. This is accomplished through a micropayment system which denominates the internal tokens, called Mojo, in the same resources needed to provide the services: disk space, bandwidth, and CPU cycles. In time you will be able to buy and sell these tokens, turning Mojo your earn into real dollars.

Of course, I've yet to use Napster or Gnutella, so who knows. But this thing gives you incentive to give as well as take.

Re:This might be a solution.

[Megane]

This is accomplished through a micropayment system which denominates the internal tokens, called Mojo, in the same resources needed to provide the services

Sounds a lot like the Slashdot karma system. Do they have Mojo whores there?

Leeches are a way of life

[Megane]

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!

Could it be the clients' fault?

[sandler]

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.

NOT a tragedy, just another Keg party.

[tylerh]

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

Napster?

[finkployd]

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

The dark side of anonimity

[Kiwi]

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

Re:The dark side of anonimity

[Kaa]

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.

I am highly suspicious of such claims. Let me point out the two most obvious problems with it. First of all, reliable child abuse statistics are very hard to come by. I suspect that it is impossible to find meaningful (not plus/minus orders of magnitude) child abuse statistics earlier than the middle of century, certainly earlier than the beginning of the century. The fact that, say, prosecution records, show that from 1890 to 1900 there were X child abuse cases and from 1990 to 2000 there were Y such cases does not mean much. It's fairly obvious that at the end of the XIX century most child abuse went unreported and unprosecuted. The rates of actual child abuse at that time are open to wild guessing.

The second problem is that definition of child abuse changed considerably. Right now in the US leaving your, say, 10-year old kid alone in the house for a couple of hours is, technically, child abuse (that depends on the state you live in). Beating your kid regularly is definitely child abuse now, but was totally socially acceptable a hundred years ago.

So, sorry, I don't buy that argument about anonymity breeding child abuse. I think it's completely bogus.

I have heard it said that the most common term asked for in the leading search engines is "pornography".

People are simpler. The most common search term (at least according the current urban legend) is "sex". Pornography is hard to spell ;-)

And in any case, what's wrong with that? Evolution is very efficient at weeding out people who are not interested in sex.

While pornography is somewhat harmless, other activity on the internet isn't

Okay, it's "mostly harmless"...

But you are really arguing for a police state: with a cop at every corner and with all you do compiled into your record that stays with you all your life. I do not want to live in such a world. I don't think many people on Slashdot do. Of course there are always those who like such worlds (after all, it's safe -- unless the government takes a dislike to you) and unfortunately they are not too rare. Oh well.


Kaa

Re:The dark side of anonimity

[puppet10]

It does not just allow people to engage in socially unaceptable acts, it allows people to engage in acts which are not locally acceptable.

The general attitude of people towards certain actions in New York is very different from for example a small southern community. The net allows people of like interests to connect with each other, even if the group is small and scattered, and find people who have similar views toward their actions.

This is a good thing for people who are not considered normal in their local communities, however those local communities may have a problem with this.

Mojo Nation

[Jim McCoy]

> 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

Money and trust

[raph]

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.

Marxist Leeching

[angst_ridden_hipster]

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!

Stealing the Web

[TrumpetPower!]

And, in a related and equally shocking development, other researchers discovered that 99% of people using the World Wide Web don't themselves create web pages but only view them. There can be only one result of this vast and tragically unballanced sucking of vital computer resources: the Imminent Death of the Internet.

b&

Those features do exist.

[Raetsel]

First, a warning: This is for Win32.

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!!)
• 
  File type (don't want those damn .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. ;-)

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.)

what about HSLINK?

[eries]

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

Uh oh, it's Huberman again

[Animats]

This article is more hype from Bernardo Huberman at PARC. Huberman is an economist of the libertarian persuasion. His answer to all problems is a market, as becomes obvious when you read his papers. His libertarian bias is so strong that he's written some very bad papers. Worse, some of them have been distributed widely because they said some things some major players wanted to hear, such as his claim that per-packet charging on the Internet was inevitable.

(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.

Re:Uh oh, it's Huberman again

[EricEldred]

Garbage in, garbage out. Make a model and then dig up the evidence the model fits the evidence. How is it that Slashdot escapes this paradox--do 99% of Slashdot users read instead of posting? I don't think so.

Commonsense ought to tell anybody that new popular sites get more links than older, static sites. But Huberman has to publish a paper in Nature to prove that. He also contorts his brain to try to prove the power law distribution and page count of sites.

There's nothing new to these ideas--they are just trotting out the old "Pareto principle" that hardly anybody tries to explain. You find self-help books now in the Business section on how to "apply" the 80/20 rule. But the "law" that Pareto discovered is too universal in nature to provide an answer to inequality in the social realm, and too abstract for anybody to say that it is greed that motivates Gnutella sharing.

Even if one admits that music sharing is a market (not clear what the costs are) or that some market principles can help in distribution (it's too early to tell, the Net is an experiment, bandwidth increases to meet demand, it is still almost too cheap to meter, it's becoming easier for everybody to publish their own works, people have other motivations to publish than to make money, and so on) Huberman still don't have the right answers--and they can't derive them simply from the data they produce.

Instead, look at the work of Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0002374. As explained ably by Mark Buchanan in New Scientist 19 August 2000, pp22-26, the natural laws of physics can explain the inequality in the power law distribution much better than economists in the past have attempted to do.

If one needs to remedy inequality then there are several programs one can attempt. One is taxes--tax the rich and give the money to the poor. But taxes often are captured back by the rich and the poor stay poor. With music sharing, if the receivers paid a small tax to the system, with the money going to the producers, one might or might not see the receivers producing more files on their own. Maybe they are motivated by fame instead of money. Or the big collectors might not increase their collections if they were given a small amount of money.

Another remedy these physicists suggest trying is simply raising the "temperature" of the system. By increasing the transactions in the system, through free trade, fair rules, more exchange, and some competition, then there is less volatility for individuals--less chance for somebody to go down and stay down.

Libertarians such as Huberman might be interested in this idea. Certainly they worship free trade. But they ought to be careful of bringing stale models to the new Internet. It might not work the same way they predict in other systems.

I for one don't really see the Gnutella "discrepancies" as a problem. There is certainly not yet any "tragedy of the commons." Because "tragedy" implies that there are limited resources. For example, on my cable modem segment I am no doubt considered a "hog" because my web server gives out big text files to people all over the world. But even if I increased my bandwidth usage tremendously, I would still be far from saturating the system. All that would happen is that some people might be delayed a few seconds by collisions. If the system ever got saturated, I would have to take my server off anyway, and then the system can work toward a new stability.

Since I don't think Huberman's economic, market model is very good at the moment, I think that we ought to explore other alternatives. For example, Frances Cairncross, editor of The Economist, in her excellent book The End of Distance, refers to at least three other ways markets could succeed in music publishing: the advertising model (Cairncross attaches Ester Dyson's name to that), the performance model (John Perry Barlow), or the sort of subscription model (Wall Street Journal formally, Stephen King less formally, ideas that date back to de Sola Pool's idea of the Internet as a model for freedom).

I don't think its that simple....

[d3a350]

I think it's a bit more complex than just "people are greedy and don't want to share". Such as:

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. . . .

GNUtella basically sucks

[FallLine]

I guess the obvious conclusion is that people will not give away, only take from free sources. But then how do you explain napster?

GNUtella has failings that are far more critical then lack of sharing users. However, there are a few key differences with sharing. First, napster has enjoyed a wealth of college students and other high bandwidth users who otherwise do not use the internet. Because they hardly use the internet, they do not notice their bandwidth decaying as much as GNUtella users--who are mostly frequent internet users. Second, GNUtella, unlike napster, closes when the user thinks he closes it. These two factor combined have created an environment on GNUtella where THOSE few users who do opt to share, get hit with more traffic than they would on napster. Thus they are further discouraged from sharing.

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.

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.

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 is meant to be slurped: NOT a commons

[abde]

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.

JOIN !LINK CLUB!

Ratios, righteousness, and respect

[RomulusNR]

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.

--