If piracy is moral and ethical and enables us to share knowledge, why do private trackers gatekeep this knowledge? It goes against the principles of piracy. Do they do it just to feel superior about bring in a sekrit club?
I would say it is more of a practical consideration. Private trackers generally enforce upload/download ratios. This ensures the health of the sharing pool stays good.
Do they ensure that each torrent is seeded? Do they have a problem of dead torrents?
Usually torrents remain seeded because private tracker users are encouraged to seed everything forever. In addition, often if a private tracker has a bonus system they will offer extra bonus points for seeding low-seed torrents, and some even automatically mark torrents as freeleech if they’re below ~5 seeds, encouraging people to revive its seed count in a targeted manner.
Don’t know what are you talking about, I was seeding on Rutracker, NNMClub for 5 years, giving 10-15GB day sometimes, I’ve seen many profiles who share 6-10-15 TBs a day, just a couple days ago a guy was asking on qBittorrent discussion how he could improve his 18Tb home seedbox, he had to open different instances of qBittorrent Enhanced, because at 10-15k torrents it was bugging out.
Their moderators contribute relentlessly, there are annual topics with competitions for best drawn picture, sang song, written poem, word games etc…
There’s a thing called Torrentovka, when people from Rutracker meet and camp, telling stories, many couples were found and married this way, Rutracker is basically a family forum.
Hell, my girlfriend uses NNMClub, we were both seeding Kaleo once at the same time :)
Health comes with morality, it shouldn’t be mandatory.
They’re talking about the good seeder to leecher ratio on private trackers, compared to the poor seeder to leecher ratio on public trackers. You and a couple of others might be good seeders on public trackers, but the majority aren’t. Private trackers try to filter out leechers.
Also, they curate the collection so that it doesn’t get filled with low quality garbage.
Part of preserving and sharing knowledge is doing quality control.
A 15-minute old account with no history posts questions about piracy morality?
As if the idea that “you have nothing to fear if you’re not doing anything wrong” ever held water.
There is a difference between moral and legal. Any first year psycology student has been posed the question regarding whether they’d steal medication for a dying family member.
Why and how does my account’s age matter?
One potential advantage is that many private trackers are meticulously-curated. The more people that are on a tracker, the harder it is to quality control every single upload. Most of the top-tier trackers aren’t just a dumping ground for data, they have tons of categories and slots for each potential piece of data to go, and if a better piece of data can fit in that slot then the previous one needs to be reviewed, deleted, and replaced.
Another reason is that private trackers often have many rules to facilitate the overall health of the tracker and its swarms, e.g. minimum quality for uploads, minimum seed times, required ratios etc. If anyone could get an account they could break the rules over and over after being banned.
Elitism.
Switch to usenet and call it a day. Switched last year and am finding the stuff I want, new and old without issue. I still have some private trackers in my list but have usenet as #1 and rarely does it not pull what I request of it.
Yeah, but unlike 20 years ago where it just came with email accounts, Newsgroups/Usenet aren’t/isn’t free anymore, right? Well, you have some free ones still, but they are filtered for piracy and alike, so rather unusable.
So, do you happen to know any free ones with everything still available or do you just pay for Usenet? If the latter, I don’t really see the difference with streamingservices (other than maybe having the file locally, but torrent does that for free too) and it takes away the whole reason of pirating stuff if you’re still gonna pay for it, imho. If the first though: Please share! 😅
You can get Usenet very cheap. I pay $6/month (less than my VPN for torrents), but there are cheaper options available. And it’s worth every penny. Downloads are much faster, more content is available, no dead links, no share ratios to worry about, no VPN needed, the list goes on.
It does feel kinda silly paying money to pirate, but you get over that as soon as you start using it.
I’m not on Usenet, but what you need to consider is that you will pay a really small sum compared to what you can find (and then download at a high speed). Your comparison to streaming services is therefore inaccurate (because there you’re going to find only a very limited amount of content at a higher price).
Sure, but with free alternatives in piracy, then paying for it again (however little) is taking steps direction streamingservices…
Why would one pay for pirated stuff (to people that didn’t even do any effort in creating the content or even in doing the pirating, nb), while it’s also freely available through different means that are just as easy and capable of being automated? 🤔
Anyway, the above is not arguing , the above is a genuine question.
Ease of access I imagine… go to one place, find what you were searching for, have great downspeed - all in very little time/with very little effort.
Again: That’s just hearsay - I’m a lowly plebs who torrents.
Piracy is more about preserving knowledge than sharing knowledge, after all, torrents are not really accessible for the majority of people. There’s a tech barrier plus in most places you want a VPN. Then you need decent bandwidth and a reliable connection. Private Trackers are all about preserving media. Maintaining healthy seeds is important, especially when it comes to media that is very niche or no longer in circulation, “legally”. Sites come and go, especially public trackers. Seeders also come and go. Private trackers last a lot longer, and have more dedicated seeders. It’s difficult and time consuming to be a dedicated seeder, and it’s much more rewarding to host your files on a private tracker than a public one.
Knowledge unshared is knowledge forgotten. Whoever preserved the knowledge will die.
Switch to usenet and call it a day. Switched last year and am finding the stuff I want, new and old without issue. I still have some private trackers in my list but have usenet as #1 and rarely does it not pull what I request of it.
Narcissism. People who truly care to share seed on public trackers.
I’m curious, I thought with DHT the hash of the file would suffice?
easy for the malicious to spoof…
What do you mean? Are you talking about the hash being spoofed?
It’s fairly trivial to craft a dummy file that has the same hash as any given file, the chance of that happening randomly is infinitesimal, hence the usefulness of hashing, but it has been done in the past as a way to poison torrents.
Do they do it just to feel superior about bring in a sekrit club?>
Yes.
Tho it takes time to join or never to their sekrit club. They look down on people who pick low quality or uses real debrid or DDLs. They will also ban you once they confirmed you are uploading to DDL sites.
I recently joined TL as my first tracker and I must say, the quality and seeders are really good. Since they enforce seeding ratios/times and incentivise it, it becomes a self sustaining system.
principles of piracy
What are principles of piracy? I am not aware of unified principles that everyone agrees to. Besides, even if you believe it is moral and ethical, it might still be illegal in their country.
Why should I share with you if you won’t share back? 99% of people do not upload anything to public or private trackers and a significant percentage don’t seed. Without those private tracker communities developing tools and working together to fulfill specific niches, none of that would trickle down to public trackers and anything but the most popular media would not be available to you. They ensure better quality and curation and I can have something I need uploaded through a request within a day a day or two because the members are motivated to share since they know it will be reciprocated.
I get love letters from my isp whenever I share torrents from public trackers. I’ve never gotten one from a private tracker so I only use private trackers now.
If piracy is moral and ethical and enables us to share knowledge, why do private trackers gatekeep this knowledge?
Because thats not how most people see it. It’s just a way to watch movies (or download stuff) for free. Private trackers ensure a higher quality experience
Piracy isn’t some high philosophical debate, it’s seeing something you want and making a copy of it.
