A private tracker is a torrenting site, like TPB, but is invite-only or has some other barrier to get in. They’re usually safer and faster, bur you have to seed. Also YMMV, obscure things might either not be on there, or have few/no seeds.
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.
You can just set your torrent program to open at startup, as long as you use your computer somewhat often you’ll be fine. Or you can look into a seedbox, it’s cheap
I’m on a few private trackers, never paid a penny towards any of them, and have high ratios in all of them
It did take me a little work and spent some time seeding stuff I didn’t really want but I got there with a shitty home connection (my connection is pretty good now but I built those ratios with dog shit speeds)
I sort of agree. When everyone is trying to seed to up their ratio, getting stuff is easy and fast. But maintaining your ratio is a nightmare. The place is essentially starved of downloaders because even people who want stuff can’t get it for fear of ruining their ratio. The only reason I had a positive ratio on what.cd was that they occasionally had freeleech days where you could download freely and only uploads counted. On those days I would just get the most popular torrents on the site and upload the shit out of them.
While these problems exist in any private tracker, I do still miss what.cd.
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:
Not seed to 100%. This damages your ratio
Seed to exactly 100%. In terms of ratio maintenance across all seeders this option makes the most sense
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.
Some great private trakers implement a system where users are rewarded for the time they spend seeding rather than the amount of data seeded. This creates an incentive towards keeping torrents available to everyone for a long time, which makes the whole system healthier.
and some other trackers completely ignore all of that and make it extremely hard to gain ratio. if they all had a bonus points system that would be great though
Yeah, RED guarantees access, but it’s also possible to gain access without it; it just takes longer. Sites like TorrentLeech can serve as valid proof for certain sites during applications, for example. Additionally, AlphaRatio also has some recruitment.
I got around this by just downloading some big freeleech porn packs or a couple new release shows/movies. My highest ratio item is an anime episode I downloaded minutes after release
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.
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.
It’s more of a broader benefit for everyone, but there are seems to usually be (a) rule(s) stating you have to seed a minimum amount of torrents to a specific ratio, which I don’t fully understand how that works past it helping torrents from completely dying.
Other than that, I don’t have a clue since I have never been apart of one.
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.
I don't speak German and I don't watch anime, so I'm probably not the best person to ask. Your best bet would probably be German tracker; if it doesn't have the content, they can likely direct you to where it is.
The other option would be to join a tracker that specializes in movies, but they tend to be somewhat difficult to get into; I would be hopeful that German trackers are easier.
Makes a difference when you want to get something that’s a bit more older or more obscure, you’ll notice few to 0 seeds on these public torrents. If you find these titles on a private tracker, you will find it well seeded with high speed peers as most people use seedboxes for seeding the torrents.
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 :)!
I’m looking for a german dub of The Last Unicorn. The only torrent I found no longer has any seeders. What private tracker could have it and is it worth it to join a private tracker to just relive a childhood memory?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like you're just not the intended target for private trackers, and that's fine.
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.
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.
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
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 blog.libtorrent.org/2020/09/bittorrent-v2/
Private trackers have seeding policies in place that mandate or incentivize keeping torrents alive for extended periods of time. As a result, you see fewer dead torrents and much faster download speeds.
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 .
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