Here’s my experience with 99% of private trackers:
“You haven’t upload enough. Download a free-leech to upload more”. So I download it, and no one downloads it from me.
You’re downloading old and/or unpopular stuff. For you to upload content someone has to be actively downloading that content (that’s how the bit torrent protocol works at the most basic level). If you choose some 5 year-old FL of a Game of Thrones pack with 7,000 seeders, that’s on you
The incentive structure just doesn’t seem designed well. It creates a zero sum game. When downloading you can either:
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Not seed to 100%. This damages your ratio
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Seed to exactly 100%. In terms of ratio maintenance across all seeders this option makes the most sense
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Seed past 100%. You build up your own ratio but deny other downloaders from reaching 100% which hurts their ratio. They must spend longer seeding the torrent to reach 100%, which further decreases the likelihood of subsequent downloaders from reaching 100% when seeding
When you seed past 100%, you essentially have to rely on bad actors to create more upload work for good actors. If there are no bad actors then seeding past 100% is to the detriment of other good actors, who you want to protect because you also rely on them for system health. And private trackers aim to minimize the number of bad actors.
Use Sonarr or Radarr, it will download content for you as soon as it is available on the tracker. Since people are mostly looking for new stuff it works really well to boost your ratio. I have at least a ratio of 10 (first episode is closer to 20) for every Ahsoka and Futurama episodes. For Asteroid City I’m currently at 18.
