this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Oh do please tell me about this "piracy" you speak of. Pirates are my people, I sailed the seas with them back in 1998 and my 28 kilobaud modem. Unfortunately I have lost sight of them in the private tracker wars.
I've never bothered with private trackers, what benefits do they actually provide?
They say they provide curation of content, keep out lawyers and provide an incentive to seed.
In practice none of these are provided.
What they really are, are entities who sell access to copyright infringement material.
They discourage network effect free sharing. They discourage posting content with investors rules and they impede seeding by creating a zero sum economy where nobody wants to download anything unless they really have to because you won't be able too seed your ratio back to 1 as everybody tries to seed and nobody disappears.
It leads to the ridiculous practice of downloading whatever gets posted on the RSS feed, just so you can seed it to other people who blind download stuff just to seed it. Basically a pump and dump scheme where someone always end up holding the bag.
All this to motivate people to buy their ratio back. I've seen one recent case they were charging 20$ to free leech 80gb.
In other words private trackers are shit, kill private trackers with DHT
Some of them have freeleech on some torrents. TorrentLeech has freeleech on every torrent over a certain size (I think 15 GB) + Box Sets of any size and then you just have to seed for 10 days total, then you can stop without penalty to your ratio. I have never paid money to TorrentLeech for access. I suppose this would change quickly if I was downloading individual episodes of a new show or 10 to 14.99 GB torrents, but that's not my usual usage pattern.
I will say that some of your criticism is correct. I will often avoid using the private tracker to avoid having to seed for 10 days. I can't get to a 1.0 ratio on private trackers, but I can on public ones, but freeleech seeding adds to my ratio with no penalty for downloading. The zero-sum vibe is both real and off-putting.
I currently have a ratio surplus of 34 GB, and it started me with 25 GB. The benefit is if I really want something, it's easy to access
I seed 5tb per month, the limit of my seedbox. All on public trackers since if they were private torrents, the seedbox would just sit idle.