Redacted's ratio economy is fucked. There's groups of people using high speed seedboxes that grab every new upload to build up ratio in a normal way, if you can call it that.
Everyone else is left with scraps, trickling data out to whoever comes later. Or maybe you get lucky and you're the lone seeder, you get a 1:1 copy. You just better hope that was on a 24-Bit FLAC release, given how big they can get.
There's many many threads on https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers about REDs economy problems. OPS has a bonus point system and suffers less, but has worse content than RED. My opinion only though
rutracker is all about putting content out there. A lot of stuff is mislabelled or lower quality, less retention, identified wrong, seeded slowly. But you can sure find a lot of oddities there.
> was any data lost
yes, absolutely. I've hundreds of albums not on RED, and I can't bother to reupload them. it's a total waste of time when you know they're unseeded in a week if not for me hanging on.
time better spent finding new music and sharing everything on soulseek instead.
Interesting. I haven't used Redacted, but was an avid user of Oink's Pink Palace, the OG music tracker. Ratio requirements were to partially to encourage people to upload stuff. The site was defined by the number (and quality) of uploads it had. If you upload a 24-bit FLAC yourself, you are guaranteed at-least its file-size added to your ratio. Seed-boxes were pretty much accepted as a requirement if you didn't want to upload anything. i.e. each user was expected to contribute in some way.
That said, things are probably different nowadays. In Oink's day everyone was on ADSL at home. Was paying €20 a month for a 100/100 OVH box; today I have 1000/100 at home and can instead spend that €20 on Spotify and Bandcamp.
In theory. In practice, most just can't be bothered using private trackers because of this. Hard to get into, hard to keep up - you have to be a dedicated archivist just to use them. Which is the polar opposite of why people have been torrenting in the past - piracy had less friction than using licensed content.
Rutracker works differently, they aren't afraid of snatch-and-run. They managed to build a community out of those dedicated archivists. So the volunteers keep the rare content afloat, and the tracker can also be open and usable by ordinary people as well (which keeps popular content afloat). This approach also has its flaws, of course.
That's what saved the what.cd economy, which had generous freeleech and gift token events. RED does it differently, and has stingy and ineffective freeleech and gift token events. On wcd, staff picks were freeleech, and that ensured people were able to download and seed, and there was free liquidity.
RED's lack of large freeleech events has meant that most people on the site don't have much buffer, and can't just download what they like. It's functionally a forced recession due to lack of liquidity.
Everyone else is left with scraps, trickling data out to whoever comes later. Or maybe you get lucky and you're the lone seeder, you get a 1:1 copy. You just better hope that was on a 24-Bit FLAC release, given how big they can get.
There's many many threads on https://old.reddit.com/r/trackers about REDs economy problems. OPS has a bonus point system and suffers less, but has worse content than RED. My opinion only though
rutracker is all about putting content out there. A lot of stuff is mislabelled or lower quality, less retention, identified wrong, seeded slowly. But you can sure find a lot of oddities there.
> was any data lost
yes, absolutely. I've hundreds of albums not on RED, and I can't bother to reupload them. it's a total waste of time when you know they're unseeded in a week if not for me hanging on.
time better spent finding new music and sharing everything on soulseek instead.