I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I've joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can't seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I 'theoretically' have access to all this content, but I'm downloading '80's workout video volume 7' in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.
This is a reason why I'm not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn't going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you're sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn't really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn't know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that's kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn't a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn't influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren't broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don't miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I've joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can't seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I 'theoretically' have access to all this content, but I'm downloading '80's workout video volume 7' in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.
This is a reason why I'm not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn't going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you're sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn't really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn't know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that's kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn't a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn't influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren't broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don't miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
What.cd was one of the hardest to seed well on, unfortunately.
although I've account on some private trackers but I never use them just for these reasons you've mentioned their economy doesn't treat all equally.