I’ll admit, when I first started torrent I was not really familiar with how it worked and how important seeding was. I would just use magnet links without configuration to save the torrent and seed after completion. Well… I have finally, got myself back to 1.00 after a couple months and working to try to always seed double what I get for each torrent.
Often times I was one of the few random seeders available for some of these torrents. Friendly reminder to give back because you never know when you’re one of the rare cases that can complete someones long lost file download!
I may be wrong, but I think you can even game the system a bit. I think the way the torrent protocol works, it prefers to trade packets between people who don’t have a complete download before it requests missing bits from seeders. So, if you restrict your download bandwidth so you avoid becoming a seeder for as long as possible, you’ll upload more stuff. If I’m right, then the ultimate way to do things would be to grab as much of the content as quickly as possible, but slow way down when you’re at 99% complete. That way you have the chunks that everyone else wants but you don’t get counted as a seeder.
I haven’t bothered looking into the protocol to verify this, but it always seems that I upload less when something’s complete vs. when it’s in progress. But, that could just be an illusion.