Comment by blfr
7 years ago
this is how private warez torrent sites work
It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state.
This is the fate of virtually all closed communities. Yes, you avoid many problems, it's tempting, but you die in the end. Usually, quickly.
Open communities suffer from many problems, and employ a variety of not-terribly-pleasant solutions like dictatorships to deal with those problems. Yes, many can be described as "toxic."
But they're also alive.
And I've seen some of these private trees. The quality tends to be rather underwhelming. As you would expect from someone tinkering at the margins without cooperation from the main drivers of the project.
Lots of private torrent sites are alive and kicking, and lots of open communities die. I'd need more evidence that openness vs closedness is what kills them.
Private torrent sites are hardly "private" in the same sense as being discussed here. They're private enough to legally defang the RIAA, but it's slightly more than trivial to gain access to any of them with even the slightest amount of savvy.
The "private" being discussed are much more exclusive.
Their forums are ghost towns. What.cd still doesn't have a successor, and one of three strong pretenders didn't even manage to stay online.
It may be caused more by competition from Spotifies and Netflixes than their closedness (although I don't agree) but they're certainly not alive and kicking.
$10 a month for more content than I know what to do with is such a cheap price to not have to deal with the pain of torrenting.
If it was $20 per DVD like in the past, the pain of torrenting was far less than the pain of the cost of buying your favorite movies.
I really think it's that simple. This value equation alone means that a majority of people won't care enough to go the extra length to participate in torrent communities. They'll just pay a small $10 a month to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, on any device, anywhere. That'll kill the incentive right from the start.
2 replies →
Redacted is definitely the successor to What.cd.
Curious why you don't think redacted.ch is the successor to what.cd? I certainly wouldn't describe it as a "ghost town" or "not alive and kicking".
Also wondering what you think of the idea that what.cd may have been too big for a private tracker to exist sustainably?
Better discussion can typically be had on community engines than specialized forums these days, unless they are large and have a decently long history, e.g. bodybuilding.com, honda-tech.com, etc.
I'd guess most discussion in such places is probably meta. tech support, or non-tech support.
> It's true and they're now mostly dead. Either gone completely or in a zombiefied state.
This is the fate of virtually all closed communities.
You will have to do better than that.
Torr3nt sites are pursued relentlessly by authorities and are aggressively closed in what people would call censorship just a short 10 years ago.
I know a few t0rr3nt sites in my country with semi-closed and small backbone communities and they are VERY functional and very lively.