Join how, exactly, and for what benefit? The private trackers I've heard of are not open or you have to pay to join (lol!). From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene. I bet theres a leaderboard somewhere with weektop and sitetop numbers. I'm too old for that shit.
This can get stupid sometimes like when they're expecting everybody to keep over 1.0 when there are people with 10.0; but usually when they're doing that it's because it's a scammy tracker (all private trackers that you have to pay to join are scammy no exceptions) and they're trying to extort people who fall below 1.0 to give them money.
But expecting people to upload is part of the deal. That's not about being old, that's about being selfish. Non-scammy private trackers make it very easy, and some just concentrate on gatekeeping and don't worry about ratios at all.
Your basic point is very true, though. The way many private trackers have lasted is to stop letting people in almost entirely. To get into a non-scammy tracker you have to know somebody irl who is on and active, and they still might not be able to get you in. Or they will pretend like they can't - inviters sometimes get punished for the quality of the people they invite, and you think sharing back is something children do.
If you are basic, then Torrentleech will cover 99.999% of your needs. It costs a few $ to join (a one time fee, and you get 1 month of free VPN), or just sign up for r/opensignups, and wait until they are open for registrations (typically once per year).
If you are too old for trackers, then just sign up for usenet. You will have to pay for it though.
For 99% of users who want to download TV shows/music/movies, The Pirate Bay is enough. I don't understand why you'd ever pay for a private tracker or Usenet unless you're looking for obscure/old stuff.
For torrent, you need to have a VPN, at which point you can also use Usenet, which, at least in my jurisdiction, you can effectively safely use without.
i bet youd pay for the top trackers if you actually knew how good they are. cool thing is, if you put in the time and effort, even the top trackers are free.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open… From what I understand they also maintain ratios and seeders race to get credit for newly uploaded files. Its the 2026 version of the 90s warez courier scene
TBF this isn’t a revival of some arch 90s thing, this is just how private trackers have been. What was the same in the aughts, for instance.
> The private trackers I've heard of are not open…
That's why they called private? Nice thing about private trackers is that you can just download without VPN (with DHT off...). Downside of private trackers, you get banned for weirdest thing, like my seed box was offline while I was out of country on vacation, I didn't download or seed anything for two weeks and got banned. Newsgroups are much better.
There are zero good private trackers that you can pay for to enter. Buying invites will get you banned, and paying the site directly is only possible on scummy trackers.
There is a lot of good information here [0]. Most notably RED is open via interviews conducted on IRC, and has a big invite forum to join other trackers. But yes, they do force you to contribute through maintaining your ratio.
Ok, I have not indulged in the new paradigm of work your way to the interesting stuff. I just did occasionally dabbling back in the day, but I wonder: I fully understand the intent of making a prospective good citizen demonstrate commitment and the level of service-side management effort to make this social network paradigm work.
But isn't this sort of structure just completely transparent to [Nation|Narco]/State Actors? Feel free to widen the set of economically interested actors.
How do you scale video interviews?
I think I am missing something about this scene. I really want to dive in tho.
You can get into some not paying. You're just required to either have a minimum ratio or share several days, whatever's reached sooner (so you don't get stuck sharing something nobody wants for eternity).
In practice, it's just adding an API key, setting a rule in the app to remove after x and then you can go back to ignoring it.
They're not especially closed and minimum ratio really isn't all that hard to maintain (if it's even required). There are usually mechanisms by which ratio isn't zero sum.
Seedpool has regular open registrations, no fee, lots of freeleech content. You can pay $10 for a VPS that gives you a TL membership and get 5 TB upload credit with a couple hours of effort. All you have to do is seed and sign in like once a month to show you are still active.
I used private torrents for the best part of 10 years but life got in the way, and when I tried to go back after my last Pvt torrent closed (Morethan..) I realized the bar was much higher than before. I only managed to get into MAM and perhaps and some point that would open more doors and so on, but it's anything but trivial lol (unless you never lost access to Pvt torrents or maybe if your friends do)
MaM actually has one of the higher bars, but they have the most regular signups and the community to support it. That’s a good point of reference from 10 years ago, though.
for quality control, amount of seeders, internal encoders. heaps of stuff to avoid issues like this as well. as someone has said TorrentLeech will cover 99% of people's use cases with buying seedbox as entry only. you only want to get to cabal trackers when you really need top quality remuxes which I don't think you'll get invited without any efforts as well
idk if there are fellow Ukrainians reading it, but I remember getting an account somewhere in exchange for an AFU donation. just a screenshot from your bank app confirming that the payment is within a few days of sending a registration application, and you are in. that tracker also had decent English originals somewhere, and a friend who's there tells that experience is great, but for foreigners he'd advise to turn on Google Translate or whatever.
the point is, some trackers don't even take these one-time payments for themselves and still provide service on the level as if you pay tenfold of that, monthly, to them.
I'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.
It sounds like you are more interested in complaining and arguing online, rather than solving your problems.
Meanwhile, I joined my first private tracker 3 years ago, and now I am in all of them (ptp, btn, etc). I do not have to worry about the ratios (cross-seed is set and forget), and after awhile you have more "upload" and "ratio" then you need for a lifetime. I barely have to seed anymore. I log in once in a while, but otherwise do not have to participate in the communities, and the selection is awesome (they basically have everything, even Mexican B movies from the 1940s, whatever floats your boat). They saturate my fiber when I download too.
But do keep complaining and arguing, you will feel better.
My experience is the same as GP's. Any time I joined a private tracker I was eventually kicked for not enough activity or low seed ratio. I tried to seed the stuff I downloaded, but usually no one seemed to want to leech from me.
It's complicated because there will always be multiple seedboxes seeding a torrent, which is excellent for keeping torrents alive, but then a normal user barely gets any chance to upload the torrent and maintain ratio.
You provide an anecdote without any data, and proceed to complain and argue for three paragraphs. Even if you were right, you'd still be worse than GP.
I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.
That's a good idea, seeding the long tail in time rather than in popularity in a sense. This would probably be the best way for me to do it, but even then it requires a different sort of investment – more storage, and more constantly online storage.
My setup is optimised for being quiet and low power, and part of that means bulk HDD storage that is mostly spun down. Seeding a large long tail of data would probably mean a lot more disk activity.
Downloading activity is much lower than you think on private trackers since they have relatively few members, but yes, if you do this, every now and then your HDD will start making noise.
Fair point. I've been burnt by some private trackers before, and their seeming expectation of time investment, but I'll give one a go with this strategy at some point if I see one open for registration.
Me too. This is the sort of thing that would traditionally be hidden as n lg n ^ (1 - eps) for some eps > 0, but it's much more amusing this way.
No way this is the correct upper bound, and I imagine it'll get refined fairly quickly. IIRC, the GapCVP results were released with a 1/n^400 complexity term, but people quickly got it down to 1/n^8 by more careful accounting.
This also reaffirms my (wishful) thinking that if there’s a way to do FTL communication it’ll be something with an absurdly tiny factor like 2^-182 with a slight asymmetry in a probability somewhere.
Then you’re not violating FTL, just gaining a very slight chance that you might know something FTL – probably.
Given that c is the speed of causality itself, FTL communications would effectively be like predicting the future.
From that angle, beating light speed by some absurdly tiny factor would probably correspond to a means of predicting the future at some almost absurdly tiny factor better than random guessing.
Edit: Actually...it doesn't make sense to call this FTL communication, it's just predicting the future state of a system given some previous state. FTL comms would have to be predicting the future state of a system without information about the previous state.
Practically speaking predictive modeling would be a means of compensating for light speed comms, kind of like branch prediction in processors or speculative decoding in LLMs, but that wouldn't actually be FTL comms.
Exactly! It’s not forbidden, just very unlikely and would be very strange.
It’d likely involve exponentially more energy as well. It’d be a good sci-if plot point if FTL communications required machines the size of Jupyter to get a few milliseconds of prescience.
You can bootstrap a tiny duration of prescience into arbitrary durations by passing back the same message over and over as many times as you like.
If you know what will happen in one minute, write down the message you see yourself writing down in one minute. In a minute, do the same thing. Now you can pass messages back two minutes.
What if I see myself writing a message in one minute, and thus I dont need to send that message back in in time for me from the future, coz ive already seen it, so I wont write it down for me in a minute?
This is about as useful as my personal time machine. It is a cardboard box that has "Time Machine" written on the side in crayon. It only travels forwards and at normal speed though.
Ah that's no fun. Maybe something like a quant sending a message to his mistress to get out of his vacation home because his wife is on the way, but the wife is cheating on the quant with the CEO of one of his investments which is the firm that's doing the FTL communication, and the signals get mixed up so the CEO the quant both arrive at the office, ready to go, and meet each other there and it's really awkward.
I think it's more likely that modern physics are wrong than that all of those weird things happen. We might simply discover a preferred reference frame, instead.
> Given that c is the speed of causality itself, FTL communications would effectively be like predicting the future.
Wouldn't faster than FTL mean that that's the speed of causality? If I send a message from a light year away telling you to "jump up and down" and you receive it in 6 months doesn't and you jump up and down, then doesn't that mean that the speed of causality in that cause was actually 2*C?
I think that's one form of FTL (versus what I described, which is not FTL at all). Another form of FTL would be the "jump"/wormhole kind where c stays the same, you bypass the distance instead.
I mean, being pedantic a little, we don't actually know if c is constant, since measuring c is rather difficult. If c is not in fact constant in some medium or environment, then a huge number of things get very weird very fast.
So, yes, we could've measured c wrong. We just would have no idea if we did.
Source: Veritasium did a very fascinating video explaining this problem.
> So, yes, we could've measured c wrong. We just would have no idea if we did.
We know we've got it pretty well close to accurate, for the bulk of the observable universe.
If c changes, then chemistry changes, and stuff like hydrogen absorption lines shift. This is how scientists have looked for changes in c in the early universe.
If we have variable c, it would be indistinguishable.
We even use the Lorentz transform, developed for post-Michelson aether theories, precisely because you cannot tell whether you’re in a varying aether or a varying geometry.
We define distance and time relative to c, so we cannot measure it in the usual sense.
Ok. I liked how in this thread some people mentioned instead "faster than causality" instead. Which is both obviously non sense and more relevant than "light".
Causality is conceptually out of time, so it's not traveling. Instead we except causality to operate everywhere anytime uniformly, and all physical dimensions to be bound by causality.
Can causality even conceptually exist outside of time? That sounds like nonsense to me, whereas "faster than causality" seems like a pretty straightforward idea.
The relative difference is so absurdly small to be irrelevant at any realisable input size. At least that's my read; e.g. even at n=10^80 (~number atoms in universe), the relative difference is ~0. That's still probably underselling how similar this is to n log n.
this is how all the proofs today are looking, they seems so minimal even when compared to minor improvements in these fields from that last 10 years im wondering why even publish these and not just make research notes public
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