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I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don’t like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don’t give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it’s just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I’m fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn’t bother me.
Those who distribute from private to public are doing a great service
(I’ve made this joke already but) You wouldn’t pirate a pirate!
I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I’ve joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can’t seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I ‘theoretically’ have access to all this content, but I’m downloading ‘80’s workout video volume 7’ in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.
This is a reason why I’m not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn’t going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you’re sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn’t really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn’t know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that’s kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn’t a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn’t influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren’t broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don’t miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
I’ve been a newbie on a bunch of private trackers, and there’s almost always some way to get ratio, you just need to figure out that site’s method, and be patient in not-downloading-everything until you can afford it.
For example, like many sites, what.cd generally had freeleeches around the site birthday and the winter holidays: nothing you downloaded counted against you, and whatever you uploaded got added to your account. They also often had artist freeleeches when an artist died; if What was around today, the site would be going wild with Jimmy Buffett traffic. Other sites have bonus points, where you get points for seeding even if no one downloads from you; and then you turn in your points for upload credit. Still other places, you can cross-seed content to get past the newbie ratio restrictions, then move on from there.
It is incredibly frustrating to be new on a site that has a whole bunch of content that you want, but if you’re patient or you figure out how the site does things, you can get a lot out of them.
Ya, I just want to get content. I don’t mind giving back to the community for it, but needing to figure out some sort of ‘system’ is too much. I’m not looking for a mini-game.
So others do the work and you do nothing?
So you both agree that the system fucking sucks. Fundamentally, the hoops you have to jump through to do anything are far worse than the annoyance of bad seeds on public torrents.
The counterpoint is that obscure torrents are better seeded on private trackers. If what you’re looking for is even mildly popular however, private trackers just suck.
I exclaimed “YES!” and started clapping after reading your comment. Just hell yeah. Beyond the weird issues that come with the model of seeding to gain access, there is something fundamentally off about the idea of private trackers, and you nailed it. It is antithetical to the whole enterprise of sharing. This transactional shit serves as a price tag that only the privileged can afford
Sadly it’s the only way old obscure stuff survives
Many times that’s true, too. One of the saddest things in torrents is seeing two torrents with identical contents that were created separately, or one just recreated so someone can add their website to it or something, thereby dividing the pool of possible peers.
I think one of the most interesting ideas in BitTorrent v2 is that hash trees are formed per-file, not per-torrent. So two torrents with identical contents could, if I understand this right, basically be considered one and the same. It would be cool to see more wide adoption and promotion of BT v2 https://blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
Here’s my experience with 99% of private trackers:
“You haven’t upload enough. Download a free-leech to upload more”. So I download it, and no one downloads it from me.
Use Sonarr or Radarr, it will download content for you as soon as it is available on the tracker. Since people are mostly looking for new stuff it works really well to boost your ratio. I have at least a ratio of 10 (first episode is closer to 20) for every Ahsoka and Futurama episodes. For Asteroid City I’m currently at 18.
Sonarr and Radarr actually take a bit after the initial upload to discover it, autobrr can grab quicker because it relies on the irc announce channel of the tracker.
yup same experience with the freeleech
You’re downloading old and/or unpopular stuff. For you to upload content someone has to be actively downloading that content (that’s how the bit torrent protocol works at the most basic level). If you choose some 5 year-old FL of a Game of Thrones pack with 7,000 seeders, that’s on you
The incentive structure just doesn’t seem designed well. It creates a zero sum game. When downloading you can either:
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Not seed to 100%. This damages your ratio
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Seed to exactly 100%. In terms of ratio maintenance across all seeders this option makes the most sense
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Seed past 100%. You build up your own ratio but deny other downloaders from reaching 100% which hurts their ratio. They must spend longer seeding the torrent to reach 100%, which further decreases the likelihood of subsequent downloaders from reaching 100% when seeding
When you seed past 100%, you essentially have to rely on bad actors to create more upload work for good actors. If there are no bad actors then seeding past 100% is to the detriment of other good actors, who you want to protect because you also rely on them for system health. And private trackers aim to minimize the number of bad actors.
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Pirate? No, no… A privateer!
I don’t have much free time to play around and never had the chance to be in a popular private tracker . It’s quite imposible for me … I mean wait for slots? A random date? An interview … forget it .
Look I get that private trackers are probably safer and have a mored dedicated community but personally I still love anyone that keeps it public and keeps the knowledge of torrenting open and available as a tool for new people to discover.
I just use the public torrents, I have an IP Blocklist, and I seed the shit out of the stuff I download if it’s got less traction on it.
I will probably find a private group or something once I realize my obscure watching habits leave me out of finding stuff unless I can literally find it physical or get lucky but for now I’m a free pirate.
How do you go about getting an invite to one of these holy grails?
I’ve never had any need, except for audiobooks. Getting into myanonymouse is just a case of knowing the rules and passing a wee test. Maybe start there?
No way in hell am I sending anyone my piss to get into a website
Could someone explain the benefits? I use public sites and download everything I’ve ever wanted and rarely have to wait more than a few minutes for them to finish. I’m no expert by any measure so I’m probably missing something.
There are three types of private trackers: general, specialty, and niche. A general tracker has most of the newest of everything - tv and movies and music and games, etc. A specialty tracker focuses on a specific media - movies or comics or audiobooks or TV, etc. And a niche tracker focuses on a specific interest - British television, or horror movies, or dnb music.
A general tracker has very similar content to public trackers, though they tend to be more secure. And like public trackers, while they’ll have the latest items, and old popular items, they tend to have retention issues.
Since a specialty tracker has a narrower focus, it tends to have deeper archives for it’s content. A movie tracker, for example, instead of having just the most recent movies and a back-catalog of older blockbusters, will have those plus a catalog of older, more obscure, less popular content, and it will often offer that content in multiple formats and sizes.
And a specialty tracker goes even deeper for those that have a particular passion for the subject that’s covered.
Do you need a private tracker? IMO, most people don’t. Most people are happy with what they have, or are happy with what they get from public trackers and other places. It’s really only if you’re finding yourself unhappy with public trackers - you’re not comfortable with the lack of privacy, for example, or you’re often looking content that you can’t find - that I would suggest looking into private trackers.
First is speed. I’ve been able to get speeds of ~50MBps (not Mbits) on private trackers, granted this is dependent on Internet connection more than anything but I get 20-50% of that speed on public trackers.
Second is retention and breadth of selection. If you’re trying to download the latest Marvel movie then every tracker is gonna have that, but if you’re looking for an older movie then it’s much harder to find on a public tracker. And if you do find one, it’s likely to be seeded by 1 person and you can only squeeze 10KBps out of it.
Hard disagree. Plenty of private trackers have massive communities of request systems. You want some stupidly obscure movie and it has to be dubbed in Romanian? Private tracker.
Edit: My comment no longer makes sense after the edit :)!
Can any of you guys with access to private trackers search for “keroro VF” or “Keroro titar” or “Keroro french”. Me and several people been looking for it, some for almost half a decade but to no avail. It’s a lost media so if you can try finding it on there we’ll be very grateful. Thanks in advance !
I don’t do much torrenting but only direct downloads (3rd world baby!) What are trackers really?
omg its spez. How does it feel to run reddit to the ground?
Yup, it’s spez from fucking Brazil