Private Trackers: The Arcane Rituals, Generous Housewives, and LLM Casualties
Notes on Private Trackers
Jenn shares her notes on private trackers, from the interview gauntlet at Redacted to the welcoming community at MyAnonamouse (MAM), which prioritizes politeness over seeding ratios. She discusses the invite economy, the grind of climbing tracker prestige, and the recent downfall of Bibliotik, a premier book tracker that got scraped by AI companies and now faces lawsuits.
They are so so excited to invite you in and have mods painstakingly walk you through the process of downloading qbittorrent and setting up a vpn.
- roenxi
> 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.
- mjr00
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 A download no longer represents a lost $50 Blu-ray or $20 CD sale to the bean counters, it represents a lost $0.01 streaming royalty.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.
- nvarsj
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.
- fdb
Stupid question, but what are trackers?
- MrDrMcCoy
I wish there was a good way for uncool people like me to score an invite to such things...