Comment by nemomarx
7 hours ago
how's Anna make money? I know they offered to share the database for ai training (which I would criticize, that's very shady) but do they have donations or something
it doesn't seem like it would be high revenue at least
The same as most private Torrent tracker: via premium accounts masquerading as donations.
Anna's Archive is very limited in performance if you don't pay.
That's not how most established private torrent trackers operate? Account privileges are usually granted according to tenure, number of uploads and ratio requirements.
Not that the other guy is right, but most established private torrent trackers absolutely allow you to bypass requirements if you "donate."
> Anna's Archive is very limited in performance if you don't pay.
Maybe if youre trying to pull an AI lab and download their full corpus, although I suspect thats not too onerous either. I have never had any issues getting stuff from annas archive for free
Anyone paying for Annas Archive is a moron. It takes more time to find the right book/file than it does for the download, which is usually under ~5MB, to finish.
I doubt most dontators think of it as "paying for Anna's Archive" - I pay to contribute to the institution more than for the minor convenience of the fast download links. I'd still donate even if I got nothing extra in return.
It also helps that AA has the best UI and search of any shadow library I've seen. Some really established bittorrent sites win out on curation but otherwise AA is top tier, not something I'm accustomed to seeing from a (free, no-signup!) clearnet/direct-download site
As far as GP's question I think you can be in it for the money (though I personally have my doubts that Anna is) and also be a force for moral good as well. Whether the operator's morals perfectly align with all of our ethics is an open question but the room at large generally tends to agree.
Also Torrentfreak's reporting has been extremely solid for an extremely long time so the link itself fits here too