Hello Siddiq,

1) My first question is the one I think most people have when they look at BitTorrent sites and see all the files that are one them; What do you
get out of running the site? Money, fame, girls...?

Really nothing, actually right now Yotoshi has no ads so there is no money, any donations do not even cover my server costs, I am married so not for the girls, and I avoid fame like the plague. I just am interested in trying new things and using this as a foundation to build more stuff on like Soundpedia.com which is a site I partnered on with another bittorrent site owner Nendoke of fenopy.com (he actually did the redesign of Yotoshi). BitTorrents provided me with a great way to interact with other developers and build bigger better projects with them. We aren't doing this to get rich, even if I was I would be putting ads on yotoshi which I don't but I know many other sites make hundreds or even thousands a day from ads, and affiliates (usenext).

2) When I look at the forums on most BitTorrent sites they are full of errors to be fixed, files to be recovered, request and complaints. In a
normal week, how much time would you say you put into keeping the site running?

Hum, we run our sites in a way that we can focus on always upgrading things, however we do spend 4 to 6 hours a day just on fixing or maintainance plus another 4 to 10 hours on adding features, making new sites, upgrading, or simplifying. Again recently most of my time and nendoke's time is being spent on out free music archive but next month we are planning to add more features to both yotoshi and fenopy as well as launch another 1 or 2 bittorrent sites.

3) Most people think of file servers and the like as a fairly complex  technology to understand and operate. What kinds of experience did you have with running software or servers before this?

Before this none, I didn't even know what linux was to be honest, but that was 4 years ago now. Now I own / operate a datacenter here in Japan.  Spike ( spykes.net) handles most of the networking (software side), also he is wicked with high availability set ups.  I handle all the hardware, installing the OS (we use mostly Fedora Core and CentOS),  and setup for the web servers. I also do some coding but mostly I work together with other coders to create finished projects.

3a) Are you a technical guru, hacker extraordinaire, script kiddie or newbie? 3b) Do you know how to program software?

I would say I'm  none of those categories, sort of learned by default but would not say I am an expert.  I know enough about coding to get what I want done, and if I don't I know enough to know when to ask for help from my partners but hardware and OS maintainance eats alot of my time.
 
4) With all thats going on in the world of media, what are the things that keep you awake at night? What are the biggest issues facing
BitTorrent operators today?

Biggest issue is a misunderstanding of copyrights and what is and is not legal.  Bittorrents are legal as they do have legal purposes (linux, idie movies, freeware). .torrent Files are legal even if they contain meta data which may or may not link to copyrighted material.  Saying it is illegal is like saying it is illegal to say "hey that guy on the corner is selling that new that came out today", no that is not illegal to say, and actually it is only the guy actually selling the material that is breaking the law. Or you can say its like buying a map, now a map shows everything in an area but that doesnt mean you can go everywhere on it without breaking the law, you might be treaspassing if you did, but its not the map publishers that are at fault.

5) As an operator of the site you have a unique perspective on what has made Torrent sites so successful with consumers. What are some of the things that have shocked, surprised or amazed you about the people that use your site?

Tough question. I guess the biggest surprise is what people are looking for. We get a huge amount of people looking for legally obtainable materials that do not break any copyrights. But then agian, Yotoshi is a search engine truely we dont host any torrents.