After rarbg went down, I got into a private torrent site. They expect everyone to maintain a certain ratio, which is reasonable, but there is actually no way to build ratio. The seed-to-download ratio is ridiculously high for all of the popular torrents, and new users aren’t allowed to post their own torrents. (As a sidebar, normies seem to run the Internet now, so all of the most recent torrent offerings are bad network TV shows, Marvel movies, or equally unwatchable fare).

When I was on Demonoid during its heyday ~20ish years ago, the standard way to build ratio was to offer something for download that nobody has, allowing your ratio to grow by uploading to the first few initial seeders.

This is not possible anymore, at least on this private site. Is this normal, or is this private torrent site just stupid?

  • Damaniel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I guess it depends on the tracker. The only private tracker I ever used was actually for arcade and video game ROMs (PleasureDome), and they structured things so that their most popular torrents (MAME sets) were free to leech but contributed to the upload side of ratio (so you could download the entire thing for ‘free’, but that download didn’t count against your ratio requirement, and you could build ratio by seeding it). It generally worked - at least most of the time, but unless you had a seedbox, a VPN with port forwarding or exposed ports for BitTorrent, you weren’t likely to build up much ratio on other torrents.

    I don’t use torrents much anymore (I’m pretty much in the Usenet camp these days), but I wouldn’t really do it seriously unless I paid for a seedbox.