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- Pastebin Surpasses 10 Million “Active” Pastes
- by Greg Kumparak
- 3 people liked this
- It took 8 years for Pastebin.com (which, for the unassociated, is sort of like the Internet’s clipboard. Anyone can paste in a big ol’ wall of text and share it with anyone else, often anonymously) to reach 1 million “active” (read: not spam or expired) pastes. In the year and a half since, it’s spiked all the way up to 10 million.
- Interestingly enough, Pastebin’s original owner chose to sell it off just before the massive uptick — bet you can’t guess why!
- Pastebin lulled along at a fairly steady pace for most of a decade, driven largely by IRC users. Pasting a massive length of text into IRC is bad practice, akin to suddenly shouting over everyone else in a conversation. Instead, users paste their epics into a site like Pastebin, sharing the link in IRC for anyone interested.
- Then came Twitter. Suddenly, being succinct wasn’t just polite — it was mandatory. Wordy twitterers flocked to the service as a means of getting their lengthier rants out there. Usage began to spike.
- Then came Anon. Best known for their myriad acts of online mischief, Anonymous turned to Pastebin (with its fittingly anonymous uploading) as a means of distributing their news releases. As these releases spread around the Internet, it acted as a free word-of-mouth campaign for Pastebin. Usage exploded.
- Alas, the legal attention that the more nefarious Pastes drew were a bit too much for the site’s original owner, Paul Dixon. Dixon sold the site for an undisclosed amount in 2010. In a post we wrote on Pastebin back in August, Dixon commented:
- I started pastebin.com in 2002 but sold it to its present owner in 2010 after it became too much of a time drain dealing with the posts which had piqued the interest of law enforcement agencies! I’m glad I did, as I don’t think I’d have enjoyed dealing the Lulzsec exposure. I applaud the present owner though, I think they’ve added a lot to the original idea…
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