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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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