😂 Thanks for proving my point

Different people have different experiences ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I guess most of the pushback is from people that through some privilege or luck either got into a “good” private tracker or have just been there from very early on. For those, they probably work very well.

But because of the massive hurdles for new users and the elitism inside it, it’s a terrible idea to suggest then to anyone new.

It’s a good point, but you also don’t keep your ratio, if you stop seeding and only leech, eventually your ratio gets bad again. You just changed to prepaid volume instead of subscription :D

But yeah, you also don’t need your usenet access forever. It’s only for rarely found stuff, remember? You just accumulate those over some time, then pay for a month to get it all, then cancel again. Main tool is public torrents.

Yeah, then the problem becomes again, “how do you get into the right private trackers”, and most of the time the answer is “hey show us how you did on other private trackers”, and then you ask yourself if you’re in a philosophical dilemma involving eggs and chickens.

Not every device obviously. But if you have spare devices laying around that you can just keep running indefinitely to seed, yes, I would classify that as one.

Well, then I guess I only got into those trackers. Point me to where I can find those like you say. But wait - it’s probably not going to be possible to get into those.

It’s just such a weird system

Oh absolutely. If you already did the hard part, then it’s worth continuing to use it.

What I’m saying is that if the hard part is in front of you, then why not be fine with 95% of stuff being available and once in a while paying for usenet for the rest? Usenet is ~1€ per month, and you don’t have to be subscribed all the time, only when you want to get stuff you can’t find on public trackers.

But that’s kind of my point, if it is so hard to find a private tracker without that system and then also joining them is hard again, why would you bother? 95% of stuff you can find on public trackers and for the rest you can go on usenet once in a while.

You’re home connection is then probably in the top% of available home connections. If you’re in the countryside in certain countries you can be lucky if you get 1Mbit up/down

Individually, yes, by correct selection of torrents you can “game” the system to your advantage. But you are wrong in the sense that the whole system in total still works like I say, if you’re good at selecting the right torrent, then another person has to not be good at it, which then in turn will be the one without the good ratio.

I have not talked about a streaming subscription, but usenet, which is even cheaper than a seedbox.

Yes, you have a seedbox, that’s exactly what I was saying, if you have that, you’re probably fine.

That is indeed essentially a seedbox that you have. You use your home server, that you use for other stuff, as a seedbox. The cost of that is not only the server itself, but all the configuration you have to do, and continued payment is also the reduced bandwidth you constantly have. And your home internet has to actually fit the “high bandwidth” category in the first place.

I just have a computer on my home network, which is also the media server.

That, my dear friend, is a seedbox, that you had to pay for, and whose continued uptime you have to pay for. It also reduces all the other upload you can do, which is also payment. So okay, maybe my “dedicated” was wrong, but still.

Apart from that…

Think about this logically. If people join private trackers and only upload/download from each other, what happens if one person has a ratio of 56?

It means that 55 people have to have a ratio of 0 or 77 people of 0.25, etc. So, people with such high ratios can only exist if there are others who become leechers. And “becoming a leecher” just means you relatively invest less in seeding than others.

Private trackers work only if you are in the top x% of seeders. The more “super-seeders” there are, the more you have to invest yourself, essentially artificially increasing the barrier of entry more and more.

It’s just a very stupid system.

Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, a usenet subscription costs less and you get everything you want without even having to seed anything.

I’ve determined it’s basically impossible to do that if you don’t own a dedicated high-bandwidth seedbox. That costs a bunch of money, at which point you may just pay for another service (usenet) that has the stuff you want.

You have to maintain a certain ratio in all of them, but even though I’ve literally seeded everything I downloaded all the time, barely anyone ever connected to me, because their download need was already filled. Torrent clients prefer seeds with higher upload speeds. Thus I stayed at 0.0X ratio the whole time. Even when some of the files were designated as “free leech”, so you can download and seed them to get your ratio up, that simply didn’t work either.

Combine that with what you said with how hard it is to join them, they’re just not worth it.

The whole concept is pretty stupid because of that. If there was a private tracker that simply looked at availability instead of ratio, sure. It’s so weird to me how you would keep requiring ratio if all files are well-seeded.

Edit: the “dedicated” part was exaggerated, yes. However, “high bandwidth” means different things in different areas. Many areas in the world still have shitty 5 Mbit internet. Just because you personally are in the “lucky area” where you can do high-bandwidth seeding from home, does not mean other people do. If you can get much more than that at home, you’re already in the “high bandwidth” group.

Ridiculous strawman in the last sentence. A pic of a furry anime character is completely innocuous, and the only thing stopping acceptance of the service is intolerance. There really is no need to try to accommodate for the intolerant.

Like others have said, a simple rational response in the line of “yes, it initially shows an inappropriate branding for our purposes, but the nerds who made this like it. This branding does not take away from its suitability as a bot prevention tool, and the branding can be easily changed.”

You can, though.

Universal Basic Income.

Probably not much anyone can do without the file in question, and I think the community rules don’t allow that?