The Real Secret About OiNK: It Was Kind Of Overrated! (Don’t You Think?)

noah | October 24, 2007 11:15 am
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So as many of you know, I used to have an OiNK account until this past April, when my former cohort decided to post the site’s most shared torrents and the admins over there pitched a fit. But you know what? Getting kicked turned out to be kind of liberating!

Sure, my banishment meant that I’d have to wait an hour or two before finding out that the new Bjork record had leaked. But the smug, cute-avatar-laden attitude of the site’s denizens–not to mention the fact that the site’s catalog was only “everything you’d ever want” if you were a twentysomething white dude whose music taste began at “indie” and ended at “rock”–irritated the crap out of me. And judging by the “Good riddance”-filled IMs and e-mails that I’ve been receiving over the past 24 hours, I wasn’t alone.

In fact, when I got booted, I was only worried about one thing: Whether or not my friend who’d invited me to the site a few years ago would get kicked as well; it didn’t seem fair that he’d have to pay for my online tomfoolery of 2007 because of a decision he made in 2005. But everything else–the music, the insufferable indieosity, the arguments about bitrate–was pretty much replaceable elsewhere on the Internet, albeit in forms that one might have to pay for once in a while (note: for those of you who start a hue and cry about the out-of-print rarities offered by the site, I would like to introduce you to the world of .rar blogs and GEMM) and not in a self-satisfied pastel wrapper.

Anyway, I’m curious: How did you feel about OiNK? Because I suspect that the prevailing attitude toward it around these parts isn’t as mournful as the collective freak-out we’ve been witnessing over the past 30 hours might indicate.

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[Image via Oink Memorial]

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