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- Hacker News
- Please don’t bring normie attention to our communities.
- The private tracker elitism really needs to stop. The sheer amount of mod power trips and fake elitism is really quite annoying.by HDBaseT
- Can anyone help me understand the benefits of joining a private tracker? I get it for music, or ebooks, etc. More niche stuff can be hard to find (even less niche stuff, in fact). But for TV or movies I don’t think I’ve ever really had trouble finding something. Always able to find something high quality, always with plenty of seeders. Even old obscure British shows, etc.
Also, unrelated, but I set up Claude with some tools for searching for torrents and managing my downloads. It’s interesting. If I word my request bluntly, it’ll refuse on copyright grounds, but if I ease it in and get it to search for info about the show first, “does there happen to be a good download available for this”, etc, then it’ll happily suggest the best rip, the source with the most seeders, even “the one it would pick”.
by sandcat_ - Are you american?
Here in the balkans, if you want anything local, you must find some private sharing site/tracker/forum with magnet links/etc., since no one really leaves stuff seeding on eg. piratebay for a long time (private trackers force you in a way), so much of the stuff becomes unavailable very soon.
The new avengers movie or whatever "globally popular" will always be available on every public tracker, but trying to find a good quality version of "Hajde da se volimo" is a pain :)
by ajsnigrutin - I recently downloaded all 10 seasons of The French Chef. I doubt it would have been possible to find them in consistent quality, or at all. They are from the 1960s.by e40
- Movies? If you want Blu-Ray remuxes or ISOs (you do, cf 2nd paragraph) of non-mainstream stuff, it can be a bit hard on public trackers.
But I do somewhat agree with you that you get less for you effort with TV/movies, since in my experience, there's less focus on quality: encoders really don't know what they're doing compared to the anime world and metadata is often partial/absent (I rarely see the BD provenance and almost never internally hosted screenshots).
- There's a lot of content on private trackers that's not available on the public internet, especially when it's more local or obscure content. You'll always find the latest US tv shows or Hollywood movies everywhere, and will for many years but when you want to look for things like Austrian movies from the 80s, a specific country edition of a given CD or a vinyl ripped with a specific turntable and needle you'll need to be on a private tracker or private forum.
If that's not what you are after, it's not worth it. It's just a very specific hobby.
by dewey - For TV or movies the benefits of a private tracker are minimal. You can definitely get by with only a public tracker.
The slight advantages are:
- On average I find the download speeds faster and the seeders more reliable. Say for example a torrent has 2 seeders 0 leechers -- on a public tracker I might not even attempt it, but on a private tracker that has a good chance of being a very fast download.
- A bit more selection if you're picky about formats, size, etc. If you're trying to download The Godfather Pt. 1 for instance, you can find that anywhere. But if you want a specific file format of a specific size to quality ratio, you're more likely to find that on a private tracker.
- Private trackers usually have some sort of request system if you really can't find something anywhere. Presumably someone will eventually satisfy that request. This can be hit or miss though since not every tracker has appropriate incentives to request fulfillers.
I mostly only torrent ebooks/audiobooks, and I use MAM. I haven't run into anything on MAM that I couldn't find on Anna's Archive or a public tracker like AudiobookBay. But I still use MAM since it has a higher chance of having the specific file format I prefer (m4b), and being a very fast download.
by frenchtoast8 - I wish there was a good way for uncool people like me to score an invite to such things...by MrDrMcCoy
- As mentioned in the article, myanonamouse has been the easy entry point into these trackers for a while now. They have an invite window opening up in a couple of days: https://www.myanonamouse.net/inviteapp.phpby dktbs
- Stupid question, but what are trackers?by fdb
- A "private tracker" is basically a speakeasy for media piracy.
It's BitTorrent, so it's peer-to-peer, but it's exclusive and secretive to avoid letting in surveillance bots that get everyone threatening letters from their ISPs.
by neutronicus - by latexr
- Not that stupid, considering the word Torrent doesn't appear above the fold. Took me a while to figure out as well.by ChiperSoft
- Torrent trackers. Basically the index that let's your search for and find torrents, private ones are invite only. Common for rare music or better sources of films, and so on.by nemomarx
- Rest in peace What . C Dby unixhero
- Protip: Orpheus exists for those who don't want to bother with Red's antiquated system that forces people to "play the game/economy" instead of just downloading what you want, uploading a little and seeding ad vitam eternam.
The only downside is that it's missing some stuff (which you can find elsewhere, usually) but you can be part of the solution.
- As a longtime RED user, I can say I've not done anything other than just download what I want and let it sit for a while, uploading maybe a couple dozen items, and I've never come close to having a problem.
I think you're fighting ghosts that don't exist if you just let stuff seed for a while after downloading, a.k.a. just being a decent tracker member.
by totallygeeky - > The only downside is that it's missing some stuff
Which is literally the reason why trackers that aim at variety use the "antiquated system". Trackers that don't care about the long tail so much because they aim for popular content and accept that old torrents will get stale / unseeded can easily be ratioless. It's a simple case of "can't have it both ways".
by dewey - > Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.
If, say, you have tons of torrents seeding all the time, and you don't download very often, how is that hard to believe?
by LoganDark - The easiest way to get upload on trackers is to upload your own content, on Red that's not very complicated if you have access to a library or another more obscure source of CDs that might not exist on the site yet.
The other way that requires more storage and longer term commitment is just to seed everything you download forever, including things that you grab on freeleech events or with tokens (A "bonus" given out on Red that you can redeem for a free download).
by dewey - Unlike public trackers, private trackers are largely filled with seeders with very few leechers. If 50 people have a file and one person goes to download you are only getting a tiny slice of that at best and for small files there may not even be enough chunks to get anything at all.
It makes no sense to me since bandwidth is so cheap compared to 20+ years ago and I think the incentives should instead encourage variety and availability like a distributed, highly-available, P2P archive.
by zenoprax - It's funny that private trackers are now more about ensuring uploads are high quality and properly labeled, and that people actually seed, than they are about dodging copyright enforcement.
Reflective of the times. Most people on the internet don't know how to install a torrent client, or even download a file. (Because most people on the internet are on a phone. I don't even know if it's possible to torrent on a phone.) And the stuff people download is mostly "free" anyway via Netflix, Spotify and other content streaming services. A download no longer represents a lost $50 Blu-ray or $20 CD sale to the bean counters, it represents a lost $0.01 streaming royalty. It seems like the only time copyright enforcement bares its teeth these days is for live sports matches.
by mjr00 - > that private trackers are now
This has always been the case for, or at least has been for as far back as I remember. Maybe you’re mixing up public and private trackers?
by Cyph0n - > I don't even know if it's possible to torrent on a phone.
Very possible for over a decade.
by rascul - bibliotek is an interesting one, and one of the most exclusive trackers around.
They have very high requirements as their entire purpose is archival. You can't download anything without uploading new content first.
It's probably the most complete archive of niche books in existence - it's a librarian's wet dream. No wonder LLM training used it, and probably paid a lot of money to someone for access.
by nvarsj - I'll actually contradict you on this, while certainly bibliotek is one of those harder to get into and "survive" private tracker is nothing compared to "The* Network" with trackers like TheOccult, TheVault and so on... on these trackers you are actually required to take a interview with some of the staff members, if you ever manage to even get into one of them your activity will be heavily monitored by admins and moderators with god complex and they will decide if you are fit enough to be appart of that community... especially the admins of TheOccult they are extraordinarily strict and insane.. But again they actually host and share some very very rare books, but you need to contribute heavily to even access them...by bronzeBus
- A Faustian library, containing every book known but you aren't allowed to read them all without being evicted from the library.by orsorna
- > Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.
I don't know how public the data would be, but it sounds like it'd be interesting to check! Looking at myanonamouse they demand a global seed ratio of 1 [0]. Naively that seems like it'd be logically impossible to maintain. What if some altruist with a powerful connection decides to make a habit of maintaining a ratio of 2? They're going to crowd someone out to a ratio of lower than 1 by the pidgeonhole principle; the aggregate number of downloads should match the number of uploads.
So either everyone has to hit a ratio of 1 which seems like it'd be hard to coordinate, or there have to be free riders.
by roenxi - Some trackers solve this by having certain torrents not count towards your download, only towards upload. Usually older torrents, or those in need of being seeded.
This, coupled with other rules, such as that you need to seed a torrent at least X amount of time after finishing it, helps to maintain a healthy site.
by pferde