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by kinkora
4007 days ago
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I might be a lil late reading this but I have a slightly off tangential question if you could have time to indulge me in. 1. why did you get out of the file host business or why were you glad to? 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc.. |
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Handling abuse complaints, wrangling bandwidth spikes, etc. ended up taking way more time than I wanted to give to it. This was before a lot of the modern easily-scalable hosting services were around, so it's not like I could just automagically spin up new instances.
So basically, I ran out of time in my day, and since I already had a good day job I figured "fuck it" and sold out.
I maaaaaybe could've gone full time with it, but it would have been really hard and I would have been competing against some already well-established players. I didn't have much presence outside a particular community, and growing it into a general-purpose thing would've probably killed the "one of us" karma that let me get popular in the first place... so... yeah, not a good plan.
> 2. how did you get out of it? sold, fizzled, etc..
Sold. The party that bought it promptly ran it into the ground in a rather impressively stupid series of decisions, and it was gone within a year. Oh well. Not my problem. I got a decent payout, which -- being younger and stupid -- I promptly blew. So basically in the end all I got was a year or two of really fun living. :)
I'm actually OK with that. It didn't start as more than just a way to serve a specific community's needs, it blew up in popularity and as a result I got some cool experience and some spending money out of it. Seems like a successful project in retrospect.