Comment by vvillena

Gnutella fell in popularity before Youtube existed. The big reason the decentralized P2P file sharing networks went away was their vulnerability to spoofing. Downloads were slow so it was important to be sure of the quality of the files being downloaded, which meant grabbing links from a website or some sort of forum. And once there's a forum, for some of the sites it was not much of a jump to add a BitTorrent tracker to the infrastructure. Additionally, for those sites that were primary sources of uploaded material, BitTorrent was a much better fit.