As I get more and more invites to private trackers, I’m finding that I find myself spending more and more time on public tracker websites.
I’ll only use private trackers if I can’t find what I’m looking for on a public tracker. Private tracker rules can get pretty onerous and I prefer to just avoid the whole scene if possible.
If I’m honest, this opinion surprises me. I didn’t expect to prefer public trackers. I always thought that private trackers were so cool and exclusive. I don’t think that way anymore.
I strongly disapprove of private trackers. I’m forced to take part in some only because the content isn’t available anywhere else. And the private trackers generally forbid re-sharing their content on public trackers, which unnecessarily gatekeeps the content and perpetuates the problem.
If it doen’t help to make everything accessible to everybody then it’s not a valuable part of the sharing ecosystem.
Do they forbid sharing the content, or do they forbid sharing the torrents? If it’s just the torrents, you can just create a public torrent with a different piece size and cross seed.
It’s the content, presumably in order to maintain exclusivity of the little private club. That’s part of the problem, I suppose. Private trackers aren’t just an anonymous one-stop supermarket like some public trackers, they’re often small personal hangouts, actual communities. In of itself that sounds great, but it always carries the danger of content being held hostage for what - at least in my eyes - amounts to pointless, snobby elitism.
The torrents, because they mess up tracker stats. Just change the source parameter so the infohash changes, and remove private=1 if you’re going to post on a public tracker.