I’ve been using public trackers for the past 20 years, and never had a problem with them. I never got any virus or malware, and almost always found what I was looking for. What I couldn’t find through public trackers, I’d find it with soulseek. So I’m wondering what are the actual advantages of using private trackers?
Dead torrents are a lot less common as people are often rewarded for seeding torrents for long periods of time or seeding torrents with very few seeds. You often get faster download speeds on torrents with few seeds as people often use seedboxes to maintain ratio.
In my case, I didn’t see any advantages compared to public trackers. Users of private trackers are supposedly all so elite, but in reality they pay for seedboxes and try to be the first to download literally every new release to at least somehow support the ratio around 1.0.
Guys, while you seed all sorts of junk for the sake of who knows what, I seed really useful content on public trackers and have a ratio of 99.3, which in fact does not affect anything.
There are normal private trackers, of course, such as Milkie, but there are a lot of dead torrents there.
I don’t see myself as elite, just lucky enough to be into piracy 15 years ago. I don’t seed “junk”, I contribute to a community.
For me personally I don’t need what much of the private ones have, sure they have community which makes it appealing to some, and I sure would like to be able to talk more openly about what I’ve been up to. I wouldn’t necessarily say that all private users are elitist, more that they enjoy what they have, and it’s a form of community. If you look at the forums for the public tracker that recently went down and has since come back up, they have a sort of community that some really enjoy.
I believe in keeping much of the content free and accessible for everyone to have easy access, so much so that recently I’ve fixed up an old PC and have started maintaining content for the public. Some might call this junk, but for me, it’s about sharing the entertainment and memories that I enjoyed.
If you always found what you were looking for in public trackers, then private trackers have no advantages for you other than download speed.
Aside from what has been posted already, the vast majority of good P2P groups only release on private trackers, some with notices to not repost publicly. There is a massive collection of quality content that is either not available on publics or completely dead and forgotten.
Specific niches that don’t see much love in public trackers. Are you looking for a spanish dub for a recent movie? An eroge? Indie rock music? Your chance of finding it with a private tracker dedicated to such content is way higher.
There are some specialty content, such as British TV and Asian TV and movies, or complete archives of porn sites, that don’t appear regularly on public torrent sites, or streaming sites for that matter.
If you never watch that kind of thing, then you don’t need to sign up for a private tracker.
Quality, organization, community, experience, reliability, and excellence, basically. Private is a luxury experience, public is for the masses.
