Slyck.com

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

~ the last words ~

These were my years and this was not my source. Between 2002 and 2005 I was in Ankara internet cafes downloading music the way everybody there did, and later on TTNet at home, so the file sharing decade is one I lived through rather than read about. But the English language P2P press was its own scene with its own regulars, and what I actually read was donanimhaber and frmtr, where the same subjects came up in Turkish and attached to hardware threads. Slyck was the American version of that conversation and I was in the other room the whole time.

It started in 2000 under the name SlyWay.com, put up by Ray Hoffmann and Thomas Mennecke for a reason that reads oddly now: mainstream outlets were not covering file sharing so much as reprinting whatever the RIAA sent them. On 10 August 2001 it became Slyck. A phpBB forum went on afterward, over internal objections, and turned into the part of the site that outlived the writing.

The signature feature was a set of numbers. Slyck published a running count of how many users were connected to each network at any moment, covering Napster and iMesh early, then FastTrack and eDonkey and the Usenet and IRC corners nobody else bothered to measure. No network wanted that published and no publication was equipped to gather it. For years, if you wanted to know which system was actually winning rather than which one was in the headlines, this was the page.

It also did real reporting. Slyck got Jon Lech Johansen on the record after DeCSS and got the anonymous Muslix64 talking about breaking AACS on HD DVD, and it interviewed MPAA lawyers in the same period, which is not a booking most piracy sites could make. When Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay in May 2006, the traffic that arrived to read about it took the servers down.

~ the record ~

~ the counters ~

The stats page is the thing worth explaining to anyone who came later. In 2003 there was no public dashboard for anything on the internet. Nobody published user counts, nothing was instrumented for outsiders, and a question as basic as whether more people were on Kazaa or on eDonkey had no authoritative answer anywhere. Slyck sampled the networks and posted what it found, and the number went into arguments and news articles for years because there was no competing figure.

That role vanished quietly rather than dramatically. BitTorrent had no single network to count, so once torrents became the default the whole measurement made no sense, and the site kept the page long after the question it answered had stopped being answerable.

~ the years it mattered ~

Slyck spent the middle of the decade as one of a handful of places where the legal machinery around file sharing was explained to the people it was aimed at. Not celebrated, explained. Court filings, settlement letters, what a subpoena to an ISP actually compels. In March 2010 the UK firm ACS:Law came after the site over comments left in its British subforum by people who had received one of the firm's mass settlement demands, and three threads came down.

That episode is the whole history in one week. A forum where recipients of legal threats compared notes was more useful and more dangerous than anything on the news page, and the pressure landed there rather than on the articles.

~ the long tail ~

Nothing killed Slyck. TorrentFreak did the same job faster, staff drifted off, and turnaround on a story went from same day to several days, which in news is the same as not running it. Mennecke lost interest in the beat gradually and left in 2017, leaving a site with no editor. The last original article had already gone up on 16 June 2016, about an iMesh account breach, which is a strange final subject for a publication that started by counting iMesh users.

After that the domain answered for another four years while the forum thinned out. The last capture in the Wayback Machine is dated 8 March 2020, and by April the address returned nothing. Twenty years of primary source material on how the file sharing era actually felt from inside went off with it, and the archive is now the only copy.

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