antillese kory saddleblasters
I actually didn’t anticipate that anyone would want to actually host files to make them available for direct download, or as Karnovski thought, figure out a way to create YouTube playlists that would stay anonymous. So, kudos to you all for your initiative!
In order to distribute them, I was either going to just copy and paste from the Google Sheets spreadsheet generated by the Form into a PM on the forum, and if that was too cantankerous or produced too messy of an output for whatever reason, I was going to create individual copies of the Spreadsheet one each for each of the individual responses, and provide share links to those. It’d be some busy work… but not much.
As for creating the playlist, that would be convenient for me and the end user for sure, however, since as far as I know the account that creates a playlist is visible on the playlist itself, I thought that might create a problem with anonymity. Not just for maintaining anonymity for the mixtape exchange, but crossing wires between the anonymity we have on the forum and to what degree our YouTube account is anonymous. My real first name is in my YouTube account name, and while I don’t have a problem with anyone here knowing what it is (it’s Jay! Hello!), it seemed simpler to just not ask for it.
My thinking behind the pick of YouTube links specifically was out of a desire for standardization. At least as far as I know, YouTube doesn’t require an account to access the basic features of, and has really an impressively vast collection of quite illegally uploaded music (and we love all of the uploaders with all of our hearts). Anyone who would be loathe to have to open a link at the end of every song could create a YouTube playlist with what they’ve received as well. So it seemed the closest option for something being universally accessible, usable on a wide variety of devices, as well as having a pretty comprehensive library.
As for the hosting and transfer of files from your own cloud based services and/or YouTube playlists that you can share without having to give away your identity in either sense if you don’t want to, I think that’s a good idea so long as you can make the point of access available in a text format. If you were to provide a Drive or Dropbox link that would be to a .zip file of everything, I wouldn’t object. I mean, if this were some other significantly less chill internet environment I’d worry about at least the hypothetical possibility of people putting viruses into .zip files, but that doesn’t seem like a reasonable fear here.