ShareReactor

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

~ the obit ~

The network reached me and the index did not. By 2003 the eDonkey side of file sharing was ordinary enough in Turkey that nobody explained it to you, and the links were just text you pasted into a client and forgot about. Where a given link had come from was somebody else's job. I never once wondered whose.

What that era is remembered for is the downloading. What it was actually like was the sorting. The eDonkey network was full of files that were not what their names said, archives that unpacked into nothing, sixty minutes of silence with the right title. A link that somebody had already opened and confirmed was worth more than the file, because the file was free and your line was not. This is the entire reason ShareReactor existed and the reason a link site with no content on it could matter to a quarter of a million people.

It began on 5 August 2001 as a personal page under the domain gowenna.da.ru, run by a woman using the handle Gowenna. It took the ShareReactor name that November. She died in January 2002, and the technical administrator, a Swiss man named Christian Riesen who posted as Simon Moon, kept it running. By the time the police came it carried around 250,000 members, roughly seven million page impressions a month and a forum holding more than a million posts.

None of that money went anywhere, because there was no money. Riesen's own account of the first police contact is that the fraud division summoned him about his finances in general, then lost interest once they worked out how large a monthly loss the site produced. The investigation continued anyway. It had stopped being about the finances some time before that.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the raid went ~

On 10 March 2004 police in the canton of Thurgau acted on a complaint filed by the Swiss Anti-Piracy Federation on behalf of film companies including Columbia TriStar. They took two ShareReactor servers. They also took Riesen's own computer, his girlfriend's computer, his folder of bank records and every backup he had.

The charge that eventually stuck was commercially assisting copyright infringement by making illegal content easier to reach. The verdict came in February 2008, four years after the doors closed, and the fine was 4,700 Swiss francs, somewhere near four thousand dollars. Two computers and four years of a man's life to establish that a page of links was worth about the price of a used car.

~ what came back ~

The forums returned that June with the links stripped out, which is a community keeping the room and giving up the reason it was built. Roughly 680,000 posts had gone with the servers. A new owner reopened the site properly in September 2006 and closed it again a month later for lack of anybody showing up.

The last attempt came on 17 December 2008, when it reappeared with Pirate Bay affiliation and BitTorrent links alongside the old ed2k ones. It went quiet on 5 August 2011, ten years to the day after the first page went up. Nobody had to shut that one down.

~ the long tail ~

What replaced ShareReactor was not another link index but a change in what a link had to prove. BitTorrent hashed the whole file and checked it as it arrived, so a bad torrent failed loudly instead of finishing and disappointing you. The curation moved into the protocol, and once it did, the human sitting in Switzerland confirming that a file was really the file stopped being a job anyone needed.

That is a better outcome and it is still a loss of a particular kind. The ed2k index was one of the last places where the useful thing on the internet was a person vouching for something by hand. Everything that came after either automated the vouching or gave up on it.

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