[soperj]

napster was fire up the program and search. You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from, often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything. Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster? Because I did, and it was vastly more difficult.

[JohnFen]

> You needed to know which FTP server you were going to pull from

True, but that was easy. It was a bit less convenient than file-sharing systems because you had to search as a separate step, using a different program, but it wasn't hard.

> often you needed to upload a certain amount of content just to download anything

I saw that sort of thing with BBSes, but never with FTP sites. I didn't know that was a thing with them.

> Did you actually ever use Scour or Audiogalaxy pre napster?

Those aren't ftp clients. I was questioning the premise that ftp was hard to use.

[soperj]

Apparently I'm mis-remembering Scour, but Audiogalaxy was definitely just a FTP site index. FTP isn't hard to use, but finding the files you were looking for and downloading them via FTP servers were definitely more difficult pre-napster. There weren't many that were just open, you'd have to upload content to be able to download something else. A lot of them were 10-1 ratios, or people were looking for specific things to trade.