So, can you find more content on private trackers, then?
Oh, yes. Between PassThePopcorn and BroadcasTheNet, I've never not found a movie or show I was looking for. It's not always a guarantee, especially for more niche movies/shows, but those two have never let me down.
For everything else, I usually use more general purpose trackers like TorrentLeech or AlphaRatio.
It's earned its terrible reputation over the last 15 or so years. Dunno how it got so easy to dupe the tracker, but once scammers found out, it was open season. Anything you searched for was not only there, but had hundreds or thousands of seeders...except it didn't actually. And the content you thought you were downloading wasn't either. Its "verified uploader" or "trusted uploader" system was only a band-aid on a gushing wound, because it was so flooded with scams that it drowned out any of the actually trustworthy content. By the time I started shifting to private trackers in 2009, I was barely visiting there anymore because I couldn't trust it.
She turns 20 this September, and I have some very fond memories of those early years, but the name is completely mud to me now. They'd be better served just starting fresh as an exclusively private tracker using much better software and an entirely different name; I doubt anyone who knows their reputation is gonna jump on this.
for years I’ve been told that “they” target the uploaders, not the downloaders for prosecution.
Yep. Once the RIAA proved that suing individual pirates for ridiculous amounts of money over one song did nothing to stop piracy, they finally changed gears: go after the people leaking the albums, the original upload groups, etc.
Governments, watchdog groups, and industry "concerns" followed suit, so eventually everyone learned that if you weren't a part of a group, you were probably (reasonably) safe. Then they started monitoring swarms on public trackers and sending those DMCA notices en masse, but that again proved how ineffective those scare tactics were. Most people switched to private trackers to avoid that annoyance, and pirates pivoted yet again.
So seeding was significantly riskier that just downloading with uploads disabled.
Seeding wasn't the only risk. Just being in the swarm -- whether uploading or downloading -- is enough to trigger a DMCA complaint. And the way BitTorrent works, you're pretty much always seeding even if the file isn't done downloading, so downloading and not seeding wasn't enough.
VPNs are a great shield against those fishing complaints, but you wanna make sure to use one that has had to prove in court that they never keep logs. A lot of them say they don't keep logs, but happily and quietly comply to subpoenas with whatever they have on customers.
Agreed. Even for channels that aren't tech-related, if I have a quick question, I typically get a faster, more in-depth response than forums/Reddit/whatever. They may not always be the correct answer, but they usually point me in the right direction. Anyone still hanging around on IRC tends to have good troubleshooting instincts.