What is the motive behind private trackers?
What is the motive behind private trackers?
If piracy is moral and ethical and enables us to share knowledge, why do private trackers gatekeep this knowledge? It goes against the principles of piracy. Do they do it just to feel superior about bring in a sekrit club?
I would say it is more of a practical consideration. Private trackers generally enforce upload/download ratios. This ensures the health of the sharing pool stays good.
Also, they curate the collection so that it doesn't get filled with low quality garbage.
Part of preserving and sharing knowledge is doing quality control.
Don't know what are you talking about, I was seeding on Rutracker, NNMClub for 5 years, giving 10-15GB day sometimes, I've seen many profiles who share 6-10-15 TBs a day, just a couple days ago a guy was asking on qBittorrent discussion how he could improve his 18Tb home seedbox, he had to open different instances of qBittorrent Enhanced, because at 10-15k torrents it was bugging out.
Their moderators contribute relentlessly, there are annual topics with competitions for best drawn picture, sang song, written poem, word games etc..
There's a thing called Torrentovka, when people from Rutracker meet and camp, telling stories, many couples were found and married this way, Rutracker is basically a family forum.
Hell, my girlfriend uses NNMClub, we were both seeding Kaleo once at the same time :)
Health comes with morality, it shouldn't be mandatory.
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Do they ensure that each torrent is seeded? Do they have a problem of dead torrents?
Usually torrents remain seeded because private tracker users are encouraged to seed everything forever. In addition, often if a private tracker has a bonus system they will offer extra bonus points for seeding low-seed torrents, and some even automatically mark torrents as freeleech if they're below ~5 seeds, encouraging people to revive its seed count in a targeted manner.
I’ll be honest I’m not trying to preserve knowledge I just want high quality stuff for free. Private trackers weed out the low quality files and keep the system healthy by also weeding out people who just leech files without seeding anything back.
I think there's lot less potential abuse, if you control your tracker and the peers. If I remember correctly, you usually have to seed till a specific ratio is reached. I doubt that any copyright-infringment-abuse-company tries to get acces to those trackers, if they have to upload stuff at first.
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One potential advantage is that many private trackers are meticulously-curated. The more people that are on a tracker, the harder it is to quality control every single upload. Most of the top-tier trackers aren't just a dumping ground for data, they have tons of categories and slots for each potential piece of data to go, and if a better piece of data can fit in that slot then the previous one needs to be reviewed, deleted, and replaced.
Another reason is that private trackers often have many rules to facilitate the overall health of the tracker and its swarms, e.g. minimum quality for uploads, minimum seed times, required ratios etc. If anyone could get an account they could break the rules over and over after being banned.
Often, ISP spy on public tracker to see if you download stuff but way less on privates one. I guess it's just a way of staying more private.
I would also add that in public trackers you can download your file and close your torrent client and not share it back and therefore be selfish in just getting what you want tihiut sharing back to the pirate community
Leechy leaches
I seed more on public than on provate tbh, why? Because there are way more leechers on public than on private or even semi private, the number of time I keep a torrent to seed and it stays at a ratio of 0 because it's a dark things that probably get downloaded once a year... So I use some fake seed software because otherwise I'm not able to see it anyway... it's sad and don't make me happy, but sometime it's the only way...
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principles of piracy
What are principles of piracy? I am not aware of unified principles that everyone agrees to. Besides, even if you believe it is moral and ethical, it might still be illegal in their country.
Morality and ethicality has nothing whatsoever to do with legal or illegal. Legality is a concept obtruded to people by a minority, elected by a miseducated and misled majority. What OP meant was obviously the spirit of sharing as opposed to profit at all costs. And the answer lies in itself, the spirit of sharing includes sharing (hence the name) and not only leeching, that's what private trackers try to assure the users do.
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I recently joined TL as my first tracker and I must say, the quality and seeders are really good. Since they enforce seeding ratios/times and incentivise it, it becomes a self sustaining system.
If piracy is moral and ethical and enables us to share knowledge, why do private trackers gatekeep this knowledge?
Because thats not how most people see it. It's just a way to watch movies (or download stuff) for free. Private trackers ensure a higher quality experience
Piracy isn't some high philosophical debate, it's seeing something you want and making a copy of it.
Switch to usenet and call it a day. Switched last year and am finding the stuff I want, new and old without issue. I still have some private trackers in my list but have usenet as #1 and rarely does it not pull what I request of it.
Yeah, but unlike 20 years ago where it just came with email accounts, Newsgroups/Usenet aren't/isn't free anymore, right? Well, you have some free ones still, but they are filtered for piracy and alike, so rather unusable.
So, do you happen to know any free ones with everything still available or do you just pay for Usenet? If the latter, I don't really see the difference with streamingservices (other than maybe having the file locally, but torrent does that for free too) and it takes away the whole reason of pirating stuff if you're still gonna pay for it, imho. If the first though: Please share! 😅
I'm not on Usenet, but what you need to consider is that you will pay a really small sum compared to what you can find (and then download at a high speed). Your comparison to streaming services is therefore inaccurate (because there you're going to find only a very limited amount of content at a higher price).
You can get Usenet very cheap. I pay $6/month (less than my VPN for torrents), but there are cheaper options available. And it's worth every penny. Downloads are much faster, more content is available, no dead links, no share ratios to worry about, no VPN needed, the list goes on.
It does feel kinda silly paying money to pirate, but you get over that as soon as you start using it.
I get love letters from my isp whenever I share torrents from public trackers. I've never gotten one from a private tracker so I only use private trackers now.
I do believe that piracy is moral and ethical and sharing knowledge is what helps humanity thrive. However, due to copyright law, the sharing of knowledge is criminalized. Private trackers serve as a way for people to share knowledge with less of a risk of bad actors (commonly known as copyright trolls) interfering. Private trackers very much are a "secret club", but that is why they are able to stay open for long periods of time without legal action. For me, whenever I download something from a private tracker I am also sure to share it publicly on other P2P networks, as to not gatekeep.
Piracy is more about preserving knowledge than sharing knowledge, after all, torrents are not really accessible for the majority of people. There's a tech barrier plus in most places you want a VPN. Then you need decent bandwidth and a reliable connection. Private Trackers are all about preserving media. Maintaining healthy seeds is important, especially when it comes to media that is very niche or no longer in circulation, "legally". Sites come and go, especially public trackers. Seeders also come and go. Private trackers last a lot longer, and have more dedicated seeders. It's difficult and time consuming to be a dedicated seeder, and it's much more rewarding to host your files on a private tracker than a public one.
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Ya definitely, you can't have one without the other.
I'm not going to be as positive as the others. For every person who seeds everything there are those doing the bare minimum. But they will do the bare minimum because they're in a good ecosphere of rarities that are seeded and don't want to lose that benefit
Do they do it just to feel superior about bring in a sekrit club?>
Yes.
Tho it takes time to join or never to their sekrit club. They look down on people who pick low quality or uses real debrid or DDLs. They will also ban you once they confirmed you are uploading to DDL sites.
Switch to usenet and call it a day. Switched last year and am finding the stuff I want, new and old without issue. I still have some private trackers in my list but have usenet as #1 and rarely does it not pull what I request of it.
A 15-minute old account with no history posts questions about piracy morality?
As if the idea that "you have nothing to fear if you're not doing anything wrong" ever held water.
There is a difference between moral and legal. Any first year psycology student has been posed the question regarding whether they'd steal medication for a dying family member.
Why and how does my account's age matter? This is pretty much the equivalent of digging a person's old tweets to find dirt about them.
Yes, it is like that if the lack of tweets indicated that you might be hiding something. It sucks if you never participated before, but the idea is that they want to interact with reliable accounts and time and activity are used for that since that us pretty much all they have to work with.
It does suck, but there really isn't a good alternate.
Elitism.
Narcissism. People who truly care to share seed on public trackers.