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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

Public trackers are the slums where people shit in the streets. You don't want to walk there and look for the things you want.

Private trackers are the communal libraries where enthusiasts work hard to improve the collective archives. They sort out the people who cannot behave and the whole experience is a lot better: rules regarding organization and filenames etc are being followed, tags are added so that you can search efficiently, requests are filled, quality is ensured, holes are plugged, people don't upload duplicates, you'll find help and exchange in forums about the tracker's topic etc etc, all because it's a private club which includes the possibility that your membership ends if you pee into the kitchen.

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> communal libraries where enthusiasts

No, it's private libraries closed to the broader community. The millions of Indians in the aforementioned comment are precisely the people who'd benefit most from free flow of information, but they're excluded. This is like setting up a premium subscription library to keep poor people out - the "slums" are precisely the people who benefit from a public library the most. Tagging and removal of duplicates can be done without making a tracker private.

Public torrents have been plenty fast enough for me, I'm not sure why people are complaining. Maybe they're not sophisticated enough to up the connection limits on their torrent software, which is why slow peers are hampering their speeds.

> This is like setting up a premium subscription library to keep poor people out - the "slums" are precisely the people who benefit from a public library the most

With those people come automated abuse reports and law firms trying to collect money from downloaders.

> Public torrents have been plenty fast enough for me, I'm not sure why people are complaining. Maybe they're not sophisticated enough to up the connection limits on their torrent software, which is why slow peers are hampering their speeds.

Are you using a gigabit connection? If not, it’s not too surprising that you would not notice this.

With private trackers, aren't you also 1 suuccesful penetration or website breach away from exposing your history?

Private trackers are small, uninteresting targets.

Even the big private trackers have less users in total than you can find in individual public swarms.

"Community" means different things to different people. Your definition seems to include every human on earth, I don't.

> This is like setting up a premium subscription library to keep poor people out

No, it's not. The content is still redistributed to the public trackers. It just avoids the American idea that public libraries should also be homeless shelters.

> Tagging and removal of duplicates can be done without making a tracker private.

You'd have to massively increase moderation, and you'd constantly remove and change torrents which would disrupt the swarm. It's not useful.

> Public torrents have been plenty fast enough for me

I don't care about the speed. I care about the quality.

So how do we reason about rutracker, a site not as glorious as some of the true private trackers, but certainly not a slum like many of the public trackers?

The same way we'd speak about PLAB: runet is different. I don't know why, maybe it's the language barrier and relying on google translate is enough of a resistance so the english-speaking masses go elsewhere.

Not sure what PLAB is...?

presumably pornolab

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