TorrentHound

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

~ the goodbye ~

By 2016 the torrent index had been a fixture of my internet for well over a decade, and TorrentHound was never one of the names in my address bar. That is not a knock on it. The second tier of that ecosystem was enormous and interchangeable on purpose, because the whole point of an index was that any of them could hand you the same hash.

It opened in 2007 as an open public index, no invite and no ratio. It carried millions of visitors a month, and at the start of 2016 it sat inside the top ten most-visited torrent sites in the world, which is roughly as high as a site of that kind gets without becoming a household name. It never became one. KickassTorrents had the traffic and the headlines; TorrentHound had nine years of uptime nobody wrote about. The attention it did attract came from the other direction, in the form of site blocks in several countries and a mention in the rightsholder submissions that feed the American notorious-markets list.

Then 2016 took the visible top of that list apart in three months. The alleged owner of KickassTorrents was arrested in Poland in July and the site went with him. Torrentz, the meta-search that indexed everybody else rather than hosting its own listings, switched itself off in August with a short farewell note. TorrentHound followed on 15 September.

Nobody raided it. There was no indictment and no seizure banner pasted over the domain. The operator did the arithmetic and stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ finito ~

The closing message was one word: Finito. When TorrentFreak pushed for a reason, the answer was the least romantic explanation available for the death of a pirate site. "It's a combination of less traffic, less revenue and our bills piling up. Then add on constantly getting bugged by anti piracy agents, just wasn't worth the headache anymore." That is the closing statement of a small business. It is also the only statement he ever made about it.

~ the year the big ones fell ~

Between July and September 2016 BitTorrent search lost three of its landmarks, and what followed was not a vacuum. Traffic redistributed to whatever was still answering, and what was still answering was mostly mirrors and aggregators with worse hygiene and shorter lifespans. The effect on whether a given file was actually obtainable came close to zero, because an index is a phone book and nothing happened to the phone network.

torrenthound.com answers today. What it serves is a single 990 by 790 pixel image with no text and no links, on a page whose language attribute is set to Italian. Nine years of index, then one JPEG.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »