One of the founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB) has bid good riddance to the site that he helped build a decade ago, which may have been definitively shuttered this week.

In a Tuesday blog post, Peter Sunde, who was released last month after having served five months in a Swedish prison for his role in aiding copyright infringement via The Pirate Bay, wrote:

TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there. No one willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads was filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse. The original deal with TPB was to close it down on its tenth birthday. Instead, on that birthday, there was a party in its "honour" in Stockholm. It was sponsored by some sexist company that sent young girls, dressed in almost no clothes, to hand out freebies to potential customers. There was a ticket price to get in, automatically excluding people with no money. The party had a set lineup with artists, scenes and so on, instead of just asking the people coming to bring the content. Everything went against the ideals that I worked for during my time as part of TPB.

Sunde did not respond to Ars’ request for further comment.

"The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least," he concluded. "From the outside I felt that no one had any interest in helping the community if it didn’t eventually pay out in cash."

More than five years ago, Sunde told Ars that in 2006, The Pirate Bay ownership was transferred to an unnamed organization, which then transferred ownership to a shady shell corporation called Reservella.

"[I] can't reveal any details I know about Reservella because of [non-disclosure agreements], not even who's the owners," he said at the time.