Not derail the thread, but what’s the benefit to using a private torrent site when there’s any number of public ones and the downloads are peer to peer? What am I missing?
In addition to what NoSleep said, in a word, reliability.
The files are always pure. Requests are filled because it's a closed community. There seem to be legal implications also (maybe just in the US though maybe UK ISPs can pick up stuff). You can always get a seed, people tend to give more of a fuck in a closed community.
One really lovely trait on private trackers is individual users actively curating stuff. One place has an utterly fantastic Halloween thread going, for example. Quite a lot of what I watch or consume is shaped this way: torrents themselves are a method but with a private community attached you get a lot more shared experiences, discussion from users who have a stake in it to some extent, and the natural outcome of consuming so much quality: wanting to explore it with others, wanting to find more, and wanting to keep the good ship sailing.
My actual online home, if anything is, doesn't even like its name spoken, so I won't. I won't lie: I flat out love the community there, for way beyond merely file acquisition reasons, largely because there's a certain mentality that's almost socialist - nobody is kept in place by stupid rules about ratio, but because without a good number of people pitching in, the operation ceases to function.
I wouldn't touch a public tracker for a multitude of reasons. But I expect the biggest is because I've been spoiled. Imagine CaB discussion with the subject matter obtainable in the post itself. There's several draws to that. Perhaps I am lucky my idea of a "private tracker" is a pseudo darknet community as rich and loyal as you get here, versus, say, the Dime model.
I'm sorry, but if you need rules to enforce sharing, it is flawed in principle, although obviously works with today's broadband speeds. Hence why you end up with models such as paying for ratio, multiple accounts or other forms of disloyalty because it's just some fuckin tip to rinse because there's fuck all else there and you only use it when you need to, hence few return visits, meaning no community or prospect of one, and the worst aspect of a public tracker in my book, the sheer temporaryness, unguided and simply awaiting targeting by whatever powers be, and who knows how committed the operators are? I'm surely sounding fanatic by now.
... I've written a love letter for my pirate ship, haven't I?
