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!
Yeah, I’m not arguing with you, it’s just a pain in the ass to deal with. I don’t mind seeding the shit I download at all but it shouldn’t be a fucking competition when it’s a requirement to download stuff. Obviously they’re not hurting for seeders. IMO a better metric would be having a required seeding time (which they do anyway) and let you download as much as you want as long as you seed it long enough. Like you said I’ll never hit a positive ratio, even doing things your way I doubt I’d find enough shit I wanted to build up a big ratio. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and rely mainly on public trackers and use the private ones only when I can’t find what I’m looking for. I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.
I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.
I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)
Presumably half the subreddit were banned from the official forums for treating it like ranked competitive piracy
“The problem”, I explain, “is that the mods have no lives”, to conclude my essay on how using a forum introduces a risk that could potentially shave precious seconds off someone’s speedrun.
Part of the problem is that people who hit some massive share ratio are doing it at the expense of people who are simply trying to hit 1.0.
My guess is that most of the people with really high ratios aren’t even aware of how much they’re sharing. They just set the things to seed and then forget them. Some people do treat it like a competition, but for many it isn’t. Most are probably just trying to be nice and make sure that something stays available.
What’s really needed is some seeding priority thing so that someone who is trying to prove they’re not a leech is given top priority to seed things, and someone who has already established their credentials is put at the back of the queue.