July 10, 2010 by sharky
"Let’s teach the greedy losers at Rapidshare an important lesson! No one use Rapidshare or post rapidshare links! Let’s give our hard earned money to any other downloader, even if same cost as rapidshare. They need to be forced out of business for their most recent despicable stunt!" - Source here.
One could easily dismiss the above testimonial to be from an isolated, disgruntled user who feels he’s been wronged by the changes in RapidShare’s policies. The reality is the boycott is very much real. Everywhere you look, new RS links are drying up on just about every popular scene blog and forum. Nobody is posting RS anymore, and rightly so.
For evidence, check out todays release on RlsLog:
http://www.rlslog.net/repo-men-unrated-proper-dvdrip-xvid-alliance/
…and look for a rapidshare link…. (at the time of post, you won’t find one)
RapidShare, and their Catch-22:
With fewer links to be found at the public level, non-premium members will be less inclined to create premium accounts. At the other end, loyal premium members (who actively post links) no longer have incentive to do so under the new model as a result of RapidShare’s soon-to-be undeniable decline in popularity. None of this is new to RS veeps of course, and in an attempt to damage control the situation they recently lowered their pricing scheme to expedite more premium account signups. A price reduction sounds like a snappy idea on paper; but if there are no uploaders it coincides with no downloaders, and eventually there’s no one left to purchase premium accounts. A classic case of a snake eating its own tail.
Removal of Rewards Program: A Gradual Process
It’s impossible to present an accurate timeline of events as to when RS began to cut back on their Rewards and other incentive programs, but it was a long time in the making. And we can’t trust RS’s own news page for accuracy intowards their own history (ahem, posts made there have been deleted at their own discretion). Launched back on August 14th 2008, this new Rewards program rewarded premium members the opportunity to convert RapidPoints into redeemable merchandise that included t-shirts, iPods, computer hardware and other tangible items. This blog post from 22-09-2008 outlined a current list of what was up for grabs at the time.
Somewhere between 07-23-2009 and 10-18-2009 (source here) RapidShare began to offer cold-hard cash for direct referrals through uploaders links. Hardly considered scandalous behavior, these same principles are what make other filehosters successful.
Not that RS didn’t already offer the option to convert RapidPoints into real money, but it wasn’t until March 4th 2010 when the Rewards program vanished from the site. And good luck finding a rapidshare.com/rewards.html link to conclude it. But no matter…
If RapidShare’s key goal is to alienate or eliminate copyright infringers from using their service, then they’ve succeeded in spades. Unfortunately for RS the pricetag for such a drastic change in protocol is a steep one which deflates this 1-click hoster into a mediocre second-rate provider. Confused? RS is dead. From a P2P perspective, us "Pirates" have cleverly moved to greener pastures. While RS is not related to torrents, the takedown smacks of a similar agenda which includes mininova, TPB and IH.
Coming soon: Alternatives to RapidShare.
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