Apologies if this is a basic question, but I am curious to know what I am missing out on by not having access to private torrents? I have been able to find everything I wanted using public ones.
I was using different private trackers but in the end dropped them and went back to public ones. One thing that private trackers may offer is the forum or the discussion board and plenty of user generated content. But in general there are many negative points:
- the drama: lots of users feel entitled and there is a very negative attitude towards newcomers
- less security: there was a time when an italian private tracker was caught and ended up giving the name and data of few active users. I don’t buy that you have to use a legit email and no vpn.
- you have to pay for a seedbox and always track your ratio: I seed forever most stuff (4k+ torrents) but I don’t want this to become a time sink
Counterpoint to these is that you don’t have to participate in the drama, many allow you to use a VPN, and seedboxes aren’t mandatory and you can just as easily permaseed to build ratio (via bonus points). What you say is true of some trackers but not with any that I’ve joined.
You also get access to a broad repository of the history of a particular torrent. Like ever preferred a really obscure version of your favorite torrent? Probably impossible to find unless it was a really popular Vidya game and there’s a legacy torrent still seeding.
I’ve still got a Myanonamouse (Private Book Tracker) account purely because there are certain editions of books that quite literally don’t exist in print except as a used copy on Amazon. But because some degenerate decided to commit all their scans to a Seedbox, ebook versions of obscure early science fiction now exist.
Very niche, but also incredibly useful if you come across something that you just can’t find elsewhere.
