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The Absurdity Rolls On

Written by Pacdan

OK, so Rapidshare seem to have decided to drop the absolutely ridiculous cat vs. dog CAPTCHA’s. Good, right? Not with what they’ve come up with for a replacement:

What the heck is that? Pseudo-3D landscape CAPTCHA? Why do they expect us to put up with this crap when there’s many better services out there, some without any CAPTCHA’s at all. If it wasn’t for their huge base of already existing files due to being the first really popular free file service out there, these guys would be out of business. This is just absurd! And bear in mind, for those of you who’ve never used the service, not only do you have to decipher these ridiculous CAPTCHA’s, you have to wait 2.5 minutes just for the privaledge of doing it. Not only that, you have to wait one minute for every megabyte you download before having the privaledge of downloading another file (up to 100 MB). Of course, this is why they invented the dynamic IP address - but for anyone without one it’s virtually unusable.

And keep in mind, competing service Mediafire offers up to 100MB files for unlimited download, no CAPTCHA’s and only a few seconds of wait time. The only restriction is no password protected archives. Megaupload offers up to 500MB files with a 45 second wait and easy three letter CAPTCHA (though they have annoying pop-ups). Both much better services, and yet Rapidshare is still on top. Why? They have an established user base. Thing like that can change very quickly, however, and if they want to keep up with their competition they’re going to have to do much, much better.

Happy hours, with no waits and no CAPTCHA’s, just don’t make up for the fact that during normal hours their service just plain sucks. And even during happy hours, you still have the waits between downloads. It’s just absurd the measures they go to trying to protect their bandwidth, especially since their service is basically based around being free bandwidth. Don’t you guys think someday your market is going to get smart enough to move to someone else?

And even if they weren’t absurdly overpriced, no one’s going to buy premium accounts - the entire point of the service is to be free. If we wanted to pay for bandwidth, we’d buy some webspace of our own, not pay to download files from some ghetto service that’s probably going to be sued out of business by the end of the year anyways.