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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.

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It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.

Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.

But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.

My experience is the same as GP's. Any time I joined a private tracker I was eventually kicked for not enough activity or low seed ratio. I tried to seed the stuff I downloaded, but usually no one seemed to want to leech from me.

It's complicated because there will always be multiple seedboxes seeding a torrent, which is excellent for keeping torrents alive, but then a normal user barely gets any chance to upload the torrent and maintain ratio.

Pretty much every tracker has bonus points for seeding, you dont need actual upload to have high ratio.

You provide an anecdote without any data, and proceed to complain and argue for three paragraphs. Even if you were right, you'd still be worse than GP.

I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.

That's a good idea, seeding the long tail in time rather than in popularity in a sense. This would probably be the best way for me to do it, but even then it requires a different sort of investment – more storage, and more constantly online storage.

My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.

Downloading activity is much lower than you think on private trackers since they have relatively few members, but yes, if you do this, every now and then your HDD will start making noise.

Fair point. I've been burnt by some private trackers before, and their seeming expectation of time investment, but I'll give one a go with this strategy at some point if I see one open for registration.

Most expect that you'll at least log in once a month or get banned for inactivity.

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