We're sorry we have have been quiet for the past year. We'd like to discuss why that is in another post. In this post we will be discussing more immediate matters relating to Mixtape.moe. -Mike
Our recent abuse reports have established a pattern of malicious content being uploaded to our service. So we decided to sample the uploads and what we found was a huge problem. We started implementing new moderation tools, but then the malicious content transformed into other types of malicious content that felt like an attempt to test the rules of what was allowed. After running some quick math and having an internal discussion about how much risk we want to put our organization, and ourselves, we've decided that we're going to shutdown Mixtape.moe due to this large increase in abuse.
We launched Mixtape, back in July, 2015, in order to make sure users could easily quickly share any file they wanted (within US laws) with other users, fast and simple. But with the current environment, we're not sure this is currently possible. Mixtape is a completely free (and AD free) service, with no accounts. We have over 3000 file uploads per day. We are unable to moderate the amount of uploads we have and we do not have sufficient moderation and reporting functions for abusive content.
In additional to the extreme abuse, we also have not been able to grow and stay afloat, financially, with Mixtape. Many users have experienced severe degradation of our service quality over time. We handle high hundreds of terabytes of data per month, but we have only shrunk in finances over the past 2 years. We haven't been able to implement our plans for paid accounts in the time we wanted and we poorly communicated our financial status in the time (especially in the past year, partially due to chaotic personal lives, over the past year, for everyone on the Sapphire team).
Our current plan is to shutdown all Mixtape.moe servers on March 31st.
We will retain data, and allow users to request their files, as long as we can afford to, until the end of 2019, and, after review (to make sure files are not malicious), try to get them back to their owner. We will not publicly share our user data and we will not sell the domain, so don't bother asking.
This decision does not come lightly. We take our policies very seriously, and have faced many legal threats, over the past 4 years, for what we believed in. However it is not worth prosecution and serious life altering threat because a very small percentage of users decide to abuse a free service. Worst of all, we understand we are letting down our biggest supporters who donated to our service for Mixtape.moe specifically. Please know, no other Sapphire project or service is being affected by this change.
We may relaunch Mixtape.moe in the future. But it is very likely Mixtape.moe will not be the same. In the mean time, we will try to focus on developing
Tavrn.gg and providing the best service we can.
Sincerely,
Mike Sulsenti - Founder of Mixtape.moe, Co-Founder of Sapphire
Odili - Software Engineer with Mixtape.moe and Co-Founder of Sapphire
If you have a Question, Comment, or Concern, you can reach us via these channels:
Discord:
https://discord.gg/sduqrRT
Twitter:
@OpenGem,
@Mixtape_Moe,
@GitGudGG,
@Tavrngg,
@GitGud_TV
Email: Mike [at] Sapphire.moe
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/drybones
Mixtape.moe Statistics
At the time of this blog post:
Number of Files: ~6 Million Uploads
Total Size of Files: ~15 Terabytes of Files, over 30TB total Disk Space Used
Amount of Bandwidth Used: ~800 Terabytes Per Month
We hope the future is brighter. "So long, and thanks for all the fish."
blog.sapphire.moe
