• They say they provide curation of content, keep out lawyers and provide an incentive to seed.

      In practice none of these are provided.

      What they really are, are entities who sell access to copyright infringement material.

      They discourage network effect free sharing. They discourage posting content with investors rules and they impede seeding by creating a zero sum economy where nobody wants to download anything unless they really have to because you won’t be able too seed your ratio back to 1 as everybody tries to seed and nobody disappears.

      It leads to the ridiculous practice of downloading whatever gets posted on the RSS feed, just so you can seed it to other people who blind download stuff just to seed it. Basically a pump and dump scheme where someone always end up holding the bag.

      All this to motivate people to buy their ratio back. I’ve seen one recent case they were charging 20$ to free leech 80gb.

      In other words private trackers are shit, kill private trackers with DHT

        • 411, ygg, bunch of others that made me jump hoops to join and then had those shitty policies. I stopped using private trackers a long time ago.

          I equate private tracker with shit tracker and not worth my time nor my seedbox bandwidth.

          DHT should have made trackers obsolete. We should have torrents of torrent files.

      • I’ve never had an experience like that on private trackers. Of the three I’ve used recently, one has no ratio tracking and just a “gentlemen’s agreement” that you seed back. One tracks ratio but doesn’t care about it, they only care that you seed back for X hours during a two week period or something like that, and the last one does track ratio, but you also get points for just seeding content even if nobody downloads from you, and you can use those points to get upload credit. None require a 1:1 ratio on anything.

        I’ve never had problems keeping a good ratio on any of these sites, I just let them seed from my media server until I decide to delete them. I even use a fairly small upload bandwidth since my service provider only gives me like 10Mbps upload.

    • Speed, quality, safety, and seed status are the main benefits IMO. The downsides are you have to keep a good ratio or at least not hit and run.

      Back when I used public sites I remember most torrents being slow, in private sites many people use a seed box so even if there are only a couple seeds it’s usually still blazing fast. Since uploaders in private sites have some reputation to upkeep, their releases will usually be quality. I also feel completely safe downloading something with only a couple seeds on private sites, but on public sites I worry if I’m downloading a virus if there are no comments and very few seeds.

      The private sites are also usually not big enough for anyone to care about, so the chances of them being taken down or targeted are minimal.

      I have also not gotten one ISP warning since moving over to private sites years ago, and that’s even with not using a VPN

    • I was invited to a private tracker by a friend who swore by them as having way more stability and more people seeding. Turns out, even after interviewing, I was never able to connect to a single torrent. Went back to public and never looked back.