I know that private trackers require users to maintain a good seed ratio. How exactly does that work out mathematically? If a bunch of users have seed ratios above 1, does that mean that there are some users who will forever be below 1, and thus end up getting kicked out, thus resulting in the private tracker just... shrinking over time?

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[–] rekabis@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (9 children)

If you are talking about sites that have a strict, non-negotiable seeding ratio requirement, it is impossible. Your only real long-term option is to write a script that will grab everything that gets uploaded on a 30-second cadence, and then aggressively super-seed that content back out. And this is regardless of what it is - this script runs 24/7, doing about 2,880 hits on the website a day for new content. Still, even with the script it will be difficult to have your overall ratio exceed more than about 1.5-2, and you may still get banned for individual seeds that never exceed 1 because no-one is very interested in them.

I have tried to use sites that have strict ratio minimums, and long-term success is impossible without an edge like the script I mentioned. It’s why I now work with sites - like myanonamouse - that have minimum seeding times for everything you grab, regardless if anyone else needs it. They tend to be far less stressful and user-hostile.

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago

and then aggressively super-seed that content back out.

What exactly do you mean by super-seed? In torrent clients there is indeed something called super-seeding aka initial seeding but that does quite the opposite of "aggressively" seed anything. The whole point of super-seeding is to encourage other peers/leeches to share data amongst themselves and hopefully become seeds themselves. This results in your own torrent client avoiding uploading torrent data to the swarm more than necessary, it's the opposite of building ratio if you're minimizing uploading data.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-seeding

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0016.html

It might be you meant to aggressively seed on an internet pipe with high upload bandwidth e.g. one of those 20 Gbps seedboxes or similar, that would make sense.

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