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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Private trackers have this bad habit still in 2026 of being super strict about ratio. You have a hard time uploading because as soon as someone uploads something, 20 seedboxes are already saturating the 3 other people downloading.

You're left with just paying for upload credits. Makes no sense.

I miss demonoid from the 2005 era something fierce. It was private but also super chill, the way it's supposed to be.

I'm a member of two fairly private trackers but haven't downloaded anything from them in a long time. It's not really worth the hassle. :( the only thing I would still say it's worth it if you find super niche private trackers with stuff nobody else has, like cinemageddon

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if your "private tracker" lets you pay for upload, it's a scam site and not at all a trusted tracker in the community lol

On first reading I took it to mean exchanging BP for upload, a common site feature with no real money cost. Perhaps they meant that seeding is pay to win and you need a seedbox, though (not my experience, FWIW).

> bad habit

I wouldn't consider a requirement that people to upload as much as they download a "bad habit" it's called not being a leech.

It's not 2008 anymore. People want to upload and can, but can't when there's 20 seedboxes for a torrent with one leecher.

I make do on multiple trackers with a home connection and a spare computer. If you cannot, then either you're doing something wrong, or should move to a different, easier tracker.

I think the seeding requirement is not bad, but bytes uploaded is a bad metric when there's just not that much traffic.

Since bittorrent prioritizes peers with better bandwidth and so many people use servers with 10G connections, you won't get much upload off your home network. On some trackers I've been seeding 24/7 since I joined and uploaded only a few gigabytes. Fortunately many of them are generous with other ways to get credit for uploading so I've never had a problem.

A few PT are getting much more lenient towards ratio, seeding time and other requirements (some used to ask you to meet certain upload "goals" in a quarter), seeing the trend and what's coming for them -- there is just less overall activity, including fewer torrents and less seeding/downloading.

Yet a few stick with all the existing, stringent rules they have, as if they are irreplaceable. I haven't touched them for a while. Let them die.

Pay 10/mo for a seedbox, it derisks your life and is extremely handy. On most sites, you can download batch torrents freeleech and then get your ratio up by leaving those seeding for a while. I use this box for a bunch of stuff so I don't feel like I'm paying just for torrents

I pay for usenet and nzb crawling. I won't play that hand wrangling over ratio anymore, it's a relic of days gone by where fewer people had internet and slower speeds. Not nagging against you btw just in general you know

Usenet is still better. I max out my gigabit connection for a few dollars a month.

It takes a small effort up front to pick out some freeleech content and/or set up autobrr, then you pretty much never have to worry about ratio ever again.

There was always people trying to make $$ with piracy (I mean, didn't the tpb owner basically all became millionaire thanks to it ?), but I feel like in recent years it had become worse. It's likely because since the 2010' many countries (mostly “western” country tbf, but also Japan and now Korea) have become way more aggressive with hunting and prosecuting piracy services operator. So in a way, like with drugs, higher risk means that a lot of “in it for the love of the game” kind of people left the scene and only more, errrmmm "money focused" people stays.

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