Essentially the title. I was trying to download a file and my colleagues told me that I should use uTorrent. I did some research and figured that this was very popular a while ago, but since then has decreased in popularity. How does it work and why did it decrease in popularity?
In: Technology
It’s 2004 and you want a file. You find it on a website to download. It begins downloading, slowly bit by bit as a single stream from the website server to your computer. Then your connection drops. Now you have to start the download from the beginning again.
You find a torrent instead. Through your torrent client the torrent file connects you to a tracker. The tracker has a list of all the people online now who have downloaded the file, or are currently downloading it and have bits of it. Now instead of getting the file from one place as a trickle of bits from beginning to end, you can get multiple chunks of different parts of the file from multiple places, with as many connections as your line and PC will allow, a torrent of data, compared to the trickle. You can leave it on for days, weeks even, and if it isn’t a dead torrent it will eventually complete, no matter your connection, or if you turn your computer off.
And as you’re downloading you’re also sending bits of the file back to other people too. After your file finishes, if you’re not a piece of shit, you’ll leave it to seed for a while to a ratio greater than 1 which means you’ve given back more than you took, and the torrent remains healthy.
To answer your second question, it’s a combination of things. Mainly people just don’t know or care about torrenting anymore. With increasing tech-illiteracy and a push from big companies, things like streaming just became easier, especially once internet speeds improved. Even with files, Browsers can resume files and even split them into multiple streams of data now pretty well. Plus, back to the tech illiteracy, many people don’t even have PCs or laptops anymore, everything is done on their phone. Android has some okay torrent clients, but Apple have always been harsh on that side of things. You can do it, but it’s not as easy as just paying a subscription to Netflix or whatever and getting the content more conveniently but at worse quality.
The big guys won.
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