As some of our commenters sort of predicted, Friday’s post about the invite-only torrent site OiNK resulted in both of your Idolators being deleted from its membership rolls within 24 hours. (Internet time sure is fast, isn’t it?) Since membership looks to be in high demand and people can get booted for any old thing, we’re curious to hear from others who have been expelled–what you did, whether or not your offenses were bitrate-related, etc. Post your stories in the comments; it’ll be like a support group, except, you know, virtual!
Earlier: The OiNK Top 10: What The BitTerrorists Are Sharing This Week
@brasstax: Ha. Oh, we miss it.
OiNK has tons of excellent-quality leaks, which I think is the main draw.
I kept my ratio in check for a few months and then blew it on a bunch of 1970s Jimmy Buffett albums for a cheesy summer/beach/Texas-themed party my friend and I threw in January.
An alternate theory by none other than Idolator’s own Brian is that I got kicked off for bad taste. A definite possibility.
Yeah. That Feist torrent is easily available from sites that don’t require logins. Avril appeared a few days ago. I don’t know why anyone would bother with sites that have ratios and all that shit.
cause those other sites lots of times have transcodes, 128kb, or albums with no id3 tags. i’ve even seen albums in a password protected .rar file with a tinyurl link to paypal page where you can pay 2.95 for the password.
i’ve invited friends to Oink before, but unless they understand the basics of ratio, or even how to open ports on their wireless router, they’ve been kicked off.
Ratios, logins, invite only – all unneeded hoops to make people feel good about themselves. All versions of the old psychological tenet of the minimal group paradigm, in which people want to belong to the in-group; and if you have to jump through all those extra hoops to get in, then you feel good about yourself.
Me, I’ll just wait a few extra days for some kindly soul to spread the same files to my regular haunts.
It’s called Usenet. No one kicks you off of it and you can get anything that was on OiNK, music that isn’t on OiNK, plus movies, TV shows, games, software, apps, whatever.
I got dumped basically for inactivity (I guess). Think I used it once or twice when I first got an invite and then I came back to it a few weeks later and I couldn’t log on.
@K-Murph: You can get re-invited if you get deleted for inactivity.
Indie-geeks are always whining about the state of the music business and so on. So what do they do? They steal shitloads of music from the bands and labels they purport to like.
OMG we’re ruining the music industry! WAHHHHHHH!
I support the artist where it counts – at the performances and in merch. I go to 3 or 4 shows a week on my dime and i’m sure most “indie-nerds” do the same.
Oh, in that case, keep stealing.
The argument appears to be: I pay for some products so I should be able to steal other products with impunity. Great.
i had never heard of this site, and since that makes my e-weiner sad, i’m going to unleash the horde that is 4chan upon it in revenge.
Artists get little to no money from album sales. If I were to buy a CD, it would be to support a label I like (Matador, for example). Most people on OiNK say they buy the record if they really dig the music. I don’t know if this is true, but so they say.
When you get an invite to OiNK, you aren’t just getting an invite to “high quality leaks” – you get an invite to the community itself. Generally friendly, it’s a great place to learn about new bands or genres you might not have heard about (and no, not everyone is an indie nerd).
I think it’s pretty sad the rep this community has been tagged with by people who really know nothing about it. A cool kid club? It’s really easy to get an invite if you know where to look. Don’t be hatin’ too hard, yo.
oink can claim it’s membership requirements are for sharing & caring’s sake but the bottom line is they require an invite for the same reason livejournal started out with invites. because by doing so that creates an illusion of exclusivity that will appeal even to those of us who hate the concept as it plays on our shared inferiority complexes.
as for the bitrates, looks like they’re sharing plenty of 192 & VBR recordings. most places i hit have 320′s. i think i can wait a few days for the better rip.
oink? how original…i wish i could become a member. then i could say i was in a prestigious club. “look at me, i’ve got the freshest stolen beats, I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD!”
As a heavy BT user, I have to disagree with cerulgalactus about ratios – ratios are what keep torrents available for other people after you’ve gotten your copy. The point isn’t that you have to upload your entire collection to some site, the point is simply that you should do what someone else did so that you could download your complete copy: share. Share and share alike, that’s all.
I think OiNK goes far beyond that mentality however and tries (much like indietorrents.com) to create a treehouse club mentality where only the “cool” kids can join and then the treehouse owners make them bring over cookies and lemonade every day or else they get kicked out. There’s a huge difference between a site like d******d.com (I’m not blanking that out to be a cool kid, I’m blanking it out because no decent torrent site wants undue coverage if they’re not seeking it) and OiNK, in that while the former limits open registrations periodically to limit load on the servers and to let the last batch of new people get up to speed, the latter is simply acting like a little bitch (of course I say this having never been a member of the latter, so what the f*** do I know?). A big similarity between the two sites? You can find everything in that OiNK screenshot on d******d.com. And usually you can find it in FLAC.