What is the motive behind private trackers?

Ilflish , 7 months ago

I’m not going to be as positive as the others. For every person who seeds everything there are those doing the bare minimum. But they will do the bare minimum because they’re in a good ecosphere of rarities that are seeded and don’t want to lose that benefit

nooneescapesthelaw , 7 months ago

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.

SHOW_ME_YOUR_ASSHOLE , 7 months ago

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.

Emerald , 7 months ago

I do believe that piracy is moral and ethical and sharing knowledge is what helps humanity thrive. However, due to copyright law, the sharing of knowledge is criminalized. Private trackers serve as a way for people to share knowledge with less of a risk of bad actors (commonly known as copyright trolls) interfering. Private trackers very much are a “secret club”, but that is why they are able to stay open for long periods of time without legal action. For me, whenever I download something from a private tracker I am also sure to share it publicly on other P2P networks, as to not gatekeep.

lauha , 7 months ago

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.

sagrotan , 7 months ago

Morality and ethicality has nothing whatsoever to do with legal or illegal. Legality is a concept obtruded to people by a minority, elected by a miseducated and misled majority. What OP meant was obviously the spirit of sharing as opposed to profit at all costs. And the answer lies in itself, the spirit of sharing includes sharing (hence the name) and not only leeching, that’s what private trackers try to assure the users do.

SchizoDenji , 7 months ago

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.

SmokeFree , 7 months ago

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.

albert180 , 7 months ago

I’m curious, I thought with DHT the hash of the file would suffice?

MalReynolds , 7 months ago

easy for the malicious to spoof…

pcouy , 7 months ago

What do you mean? Are you talking about the hash being spoofed?

MalReynolds , 7 months ago

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.

dinosaurdynasty , 7 months ago

This is FUD. There is no publicly known pre-image attack against SHA1, the hash used in mainline DHT.

aldalire , 7 months ago

Huh, there has been a detected SHA1 hash collision in 2017. But unless your malicious actor is the NSA it’s unlikely they would be able to crack the hash

shattered.io

dinosaurdynasty , 7 months ago

Collision, not pre-image attack (the two are different)

crossover , 7 months ago

I’ll be honest I’m not trying to preserve knowledge I just want high quality stuff for free. Private trackers weed out the low quality files and keep the system healthy by also weeding out people who just leech files without seeding anything back.

mayoi , 7 months ago

Narcissism. People who truly care to share seed on public trackers.

Maximilious , 7 months ago

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.

Maximilious , 7 months ago

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.

doctorn , 7 months ago

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! 😅

xspurnx , 7 months ago

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).

doctorn , 7 months ago

Sure, but with free alternative s 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.

xspurnx , 7 months ago

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.

CalicoJack , 7 months ago

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.

doctorn , 7 months ago

I dunno, my torrents are never corrupted or missing either abd download full speed for free. I see everything I want minutes after it airs, with FileBot sutomatically sorting everything for free all I need to do is open Kodi on my AndroidTV and select what I want to watch…

I see no need or afvantage of changing that to anything that costs me money to get the exact same result… 🤷‍♂️

I think it’s just peopke that did pay justifying themselves to themselves after the fact. There is no real advantage at all…

RobotToaster , 7 months ago

Elitism.

Stormcrow , 7 months ago

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.

lukas , 7 months ago

Knowledge unshared is knowledge forgotten. Whoever preserved the knowledge will die.

Stormcrow , 7 months ago

Ya definitely, you can’t have one without the other.

yote_zip , 7 months ago

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.