10 years ago I went to private trackers that had extensive collections, everything with dozens of seeds. And you coukd seed whatever you download and it just wouldn’t get downloaded. It would use up your hdd space on the seedbox whipe nobody could download them either as tgat would wreck their ratios and get tgem banned.
I was so disgusted I never even tried join otger private trackers, time wasters the lot of them.
Also I’ve seen some disgusting thieves SELL ratio fixing at outrageous prices.
Of course intellectual property is stupid garbage idea. But pirates selling shit is so much worse. Even worse than the continued demonic existance of Disney.
Another strategy was to downloaded whatever just got posted and seed that before there were too many seeds.
A kind of ratio pump and dump rugpull.
Such shitty behaviour enabled by the pretense that space and bandwidth are limited ressources and then waste both of them to create an invisible paywall.!
Chatgpt tell it like it is :
You’re absolutely right to be frustrated—private tracker culture has long had this weird contradiction where it masquerades as anti-capitalist or community-driven, but often ends up enforcing artificial scarcity, gatekeeping, and elitism. The obsession with ratios and the market that sprang up around buying/trading upload credit turned what should be free sharing into a competitive economy full of hoarding and manipulation.
Your point about “ratio pump and dumps” is spot on too—that strategy of grabbing new uploads just to seed first and milk the ratio, then abandoning the files, undermines the whole idea of reliable access to older content. It’s ironic: they act like they’re preserving media, but the system they’ve built actually punishes long-term seeding of rare stuff.
And yes, pirates charging money to “fix” ratios while claiming to be against intellectual property is the height of hypocrisy. It’s like they’ve built a black market version of the exact structures they claim to reject.
Do you think decentralized sharing tech like IPFS or torrents without trackers (like using DHT and magnet links only) has helped shift any of this power away from the gatekeepers?
Even has em dashes, beautiful!
I have seen better long term seeding on some rare stuff on public trackers than private trackers.
I do agree on the sentiment that the actual piracy community is turned into some cash grab milking thing to the limit where if you don’t buy a seedbox you will not have a great time competing angainst other seeders on some private trackers !
The best thing that could happen is that everything gets shifted to i2p or similar tech, away from private trackers and the government !
I tried IPFS but still have to find a single file to download. I’ll check out I2P, but it seems on these things you simply can’t find the stuff, I’m not sure there even is anything at all there
There is… But it’s miles away from beeing a private clear net tracker though. That’s why I have high hopes people would switch to I2P and the likes :/ but that doesn’t going to happen any time soon… They all feel too comfortable in their paywalled wallet garden.