Eroshare

» see eroshare.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every general-purpose media host on the web has a rule against adult content, which is why the adult internet has always had to run its own parallel infrastructure for the most boring possible function: putting a file somewhere and getting a link back. Eroshare was that, from 2007. It started as a place to host what YouTube would not, and ended up closer to Imgur with video, an album service where a batch of files became one anonymous address you could paste anywhere.

Anonymity is what made it the default. The communities that used it hardest were Reddit's amateur boards, where the whole arrangement depends on a host that requires no account tied to a real identity and no profile page connecting one upload to the next. Eroshare was quietly load-bearing for a corner of a very large website, to the point that a subreddit existed purely to collect what bots scraped off it.

I was not in those communities and have no personal memory of the site to offer. What draws me to it is the plumbing question underneath: a service a lot of people depended on daily, run by two men whose surnames nobody has ever published.

The closure notice went up in June 2017 with a 30 June end date. Randy and Paul, which is as much as anyone outside knew of them, wrote that the amount of growth and demand had been phenomenal to say the least, and that they were sadly no longer able to offer this service. No cause was given, and ten years of files came down with the site.

~ the dossier ~

~ the man with the hard drives ~

What happened next is the part worth recording. A Redditor posting as jerkenstine spent the notice period pulling the service down to disk, then packaged roughly 1,150 hours of video, about 1,077 gigabytes, into a torrent that included enough of the site's own structure to be browsable offline. He paid for the drives and the seedbox time out of his own pocket, around two hundred dollars, and the torrent was carrying about forty seeds when Vice wrote it up.

Archive Team lists Eroshare's own status as partially saved, with what was collected sitting in a restricted item at the Internet Archive. For a category of content that institutional archives are structurally unwilling to touch, one person with a seedbox is often the entire preservation strategy.

~ who hosts this now ~

The subreddits that ran on Eroshare spent the weeks after the announcement doing what every community does when its host dies, which is arguing about where to go next while the clock runs. Several successors picked up the traffic, and the category has stayed exactly as fragile as it was: small operations with no outside funding, under no obligation to warn anyone before the disks go off. eroshare.com itself does not answer today, and the technology press covered the place exactly once, on the way out.

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