this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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I've never bothered with private trackers, what benefits do they actually provide?
Speed, quality, safety, and seed status are the main benefits IMO. The downsides are you have to keep a good ratio or at least not hit and run.
Back when I used public sites I remember most torrents being slow, in private sites many people use a seed box so even if there are only a couple seeds it's usually still blazing fast. Since uploaders in private sites have some reputation to upkeep, their releases will usually be quality. I also feel completely safe downloading something with only a couple seeds on private sites, but on public sites I worry if I'm downloading a virus if there are no comments and very few seeds.
The private sites are also usually not big enough for anyone to care about, so the chances of them being taken down or targeted are minimal.
I have also not gotten one ISP warning since moving over to private sites years ago, and that's even with not using a VPN
Yeah, it makes very little sense to "play the long game" on a private site to spread malware to a small user base when you could just go to any public tracker where it's the Wild West. Could someone do it? Sure, but it's really not realistic to expect that regularly.
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.
I've never had an experience like that on private trackers. Of the three I've used recently, one has no ratio tracking and just a "gentlemen's agreement" that you seed back. One tracks ratio but doesn't care about it, they only care that you seed back for X hours during a two week period or something like that, and the last one does track ratio, but you also get points for just seeding content even if nobody downloads from you, and you can use those points to get upload credit. None require a 1:1 ratio on anything.
I've never had problems keeping a good ratio on any of these sites, I just let them seed from my media server until I decide to delete them. I even use a fairly small upload bandwidth since my service provider only gives me like 10Mbps upload.
Lol, what kinds of shitty private trackers are you on?
411, ygg, bunch of others that made me jump hoops to join and then had those shitty policies. I stopped using private trackers a long time ago.
I equate private tracker with shit tracker and not worth my time nor my seedbox bandwidth.
DHT should have made trackers obsolete. We should have torrents of torrent files.
None, just use a VPN and thepiratebay/nyaa/whatever else and stop being a baby
Dont use thepiratebay, jesus christ its so unsafe (for apps atleast)
I would never execute a pirated app in a non sandboxed environment, that's just silly.
Just buy games on steam like the rest of the world.
I'm talking movies and anime personally
Jesus is bungiefan_ak holding you at gunpoint or something
Who tf
I have like 600 games in my backlog between emulation and steam sales, why would I risk a keylogger snatching my bank info?
You think you're safe using a private tracker? Lol
I might trust fitgirl repacks, if I was truly broke and desperate and kept it to my gaming only partition.
i feel like you don't trust piracy because you bricked the family computer when you were 12
Also "don't trust piracy" my ass, my plex library is bigger than your mom.
I'm just not stupid enough to get PC herpes.
Yeah, me too. YOU just cant seem to fathom that basic caution when downloading will protect you from getting punjabinovirusfree100%.exe
Basic caution is a sandboxed environment, anything less is foolish.
If you torrent games you will get a virus eventually, because your bank info is worth more than uploader clout.
I'm happy to hear an alternate viewpoint if you have any point besides "lol you just don't get it".
Alright, fair enough.
I dont really care if i get a virus, just do a fresh reinstall of windows/linux and badabing badaboom your back. i use piracy for playing games that im not able to. example is emulation, like i dont think alot of people have a game console collection and have the time/money to jailbreak/ buy an entire collections worth of games. Also i dont really wanna waste money on a game im not sure ill play.
Also i wanna hear YOU say why you dont pirate games, because all ive been reading is the type of insults id be hearing in the third grade.
Emulating old games is almost entirely safe. Sure it might be possible for a rom to have something injected in it that takes advantage of some emulator vulnerability but it's extremely unlikely and I've never heard of it. Keep on doing that.
Modern games (or any other .exe files) are very risky. And you may never know you have a keylogger.
If there was no risk I'd pirate modern games. However you usually can't play online anyway. And having all my games in one place on steam is very nice, with cloud saves and family sharing too.
I was invited to a private tracker by a friend who swore by them as having way more stability and more people seeding. Turns out, even after interviewing, I was never able to connect to a single torrent. Went back to public and never looked back.