this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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since this is rating traffic as % of total... I imagine this is less a result of "bittorrent is dying/nobody uses it" and more a result of "the rest of the internet traffic has grown exponentially with the availability of ubiquitous fast connections, while the number of bittorrent consumers has been roughly steady"
no shit BitTorrent was the majority of traffic in 2004. Most connected users were still using some form of DSL or low-bandwidth cable, and some of us were even still using ISDN/Dialup. Even youtube was still a pipe-dream, so most "normal" browsing folk were loading forum web pages with sizes <50k per page. Bittorrent allowing resilient, long-term downloads over slow pipes was the only thing that even EXISTED for bulk data transfer, and could saturate a pipe for days.
Also when you combine this with some other news, like "Bots now make up nearly half of all internet traffic, and that's very bad news for our security", it skews it even further to being rather meaningless - bots are probably doing quite a bit less bittorrenting.
In early 2019 bittorrent's website views fluctuated between ~6M to ~9M. Now it's around 3M to 4M.
In early 2019 utorrent's visits fluctuated between ~26M to ~75M. Now it sits around 25M to 21M.
The fact that there were far more captures in early 2019 for both of them might be an indication that this was their peak, and while visits have reduced since then they're far from dying.
Streaming services may be part of the reason, though I also think it's because many games and software have switched to freemium & microtransactions so spending money is optional, along with the fact that free and open source alternatives to mainstream software have become more robust and popular. When I was a kid I torrented Sony Vegas, but now that's simply not necessary since we have DaVinci Resolve.
uTorrent sold out, its decline is not only due to BitTorrent becoming less popular, but also because what was once a very thin client at one point was bundled with malware so a lot of people kept using old versions or switched to clients like qBitTorrent
Well, people have migrated from Utorrent to qbittorrent or other BT clients after Utorrent was classified as malware.
and bittorrent.com owns Utorrent so...
I have never visited the actual website of any of the clients either. Getting programs from their website is so windows XP.
Magazine CDs and DVDs were my bacon.
apt-get install qbittorrentwhy would I visit their site for any reason?And just to add - why is torrenting associated with shady stuff? Linux isos are available and download much faster over it, same for some monolithic applications like LibreOffice and other regular stuff.
Doesn’t matter, Linux users a tiny minority of end users and those using Debian’s package manager are a minority of even that. You’re less than a rounding error.
Sick burn
I know those good old school days. downloading movies, songs, games, and wares on utorrent. No ransomware, no social media giants, just sharing content and information and exploring the internet at 286kbps.
Ah, downloading postage stamp sized anime releases that still took all day. Forget binging a series in one go, you watched an episode or two a day because that was as fast as you could get them.
But you can't forget the absolute minefield of the era of Kazaa, Emule & Limewire - you never knew when you'd get a virus, something random, literally just cp or actually manage to grab the thing you intended to.
Was torrent available (or common) during those speeds? I remember napster/kazaa/limeware and downloading stuff like green day.exe
I started using torrents when I already had broadband, although very asymmetrical