Apologies if this is a basic question, but I am curious to know what I am missing out on by not having access to private torrents? I have been able to find everything I wanted using public ones.

  • GeekFTW@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Content you may not be able to find elsewhere (for example, MySpleen has tons of old discontinued/out of print content), as well as you aren’t going to find copyright holders in private tracker swarms monitoring for IP’s to have infringement notices sent to.

    Downside: If you don’t like seeding, you get to fuck yourself and get used to liking seeding or you lose your account.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    Public trackers’ public nature means they’re more likely to result in your activity being seen / tracked by entities you don’t want it tracked by, for one. Ever gotten one of those letters from your ISP warning you not to download pirated shit? My understanding is that that’s usually the result of using an insecure tracker.

  • MagicalRaccoon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    For me:

    • Lifetime of torrents, honestly I rarely have dead torrents on private trackers. Also, most of them send an alert to previous seeders telling them one torrent needs some seeds. So for that it’s WAY better than public.
    • Niche contents, I’m into rare movies and some movies are only available on private trackers (unfortunately), so yeah, for me no choice. Though I really miss VXT releases on RARBG :(.

    Except that… Not much. I think I still would keep my seedbox if I was on public trackers. Private or public, we all have to do our jobs and participate in seeding what we got :)

  • orcrist@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Some private trackers are shady. Even if you seed, they might undercount your contribution and ask for money. If that happens, it’s a scam, just walk away.