Notes on Private Trackers
In a recentish dialogue, I made a playful sideswipe at the sort of arcane rituals that certain private trackers force prospective inductees to undergo.
The website I was most thinking of + poking fun at isΒ Redacted, a private tracker. They have a standalone website for their study guide here.
Allowing unknowns to get inducted if they pass an interview is a genuine public service. By default, private trackers live up to their names wrt privacy, and the only way to get in is if you can get someone who is already inside to send you an invite. Having a non-nepotism avenue is a ton of additional work, and it's thankless. Actually, it's worse than thankless - it exposes you to many many accusations of gatekeeping and snobbery, which you can avoid entirely by never offering a public avenue at all and disappearing from the public eye.
Once you're in the ecosystem though, then things ease up a lot. A bunch of the private trackers cross-advertise in each others' forums since torrenting etiquette is pretty universal, and if you're good enough for one that's a decent signal that you're good enough for the rest. That being said, there are trackers that are easier to get into and trackers that are more exclusive.
Some people who are pretty into private trackers maintain this wiki page on Reddit, where you can see what's required from you to procure more private tracker invites. If you start at a low prestige tracker and you want to be in a super high prestige tracker, you may need to do up to half a dozen jumps, each of which may take 4-12 months.
The easiest nice private tracker to get invited into is myanonamouse (MAM), which is run by I assume a cabal of housewives; the first, most important rule of MAM isn't about seeding ratios, it's about avoiding swear words. They are so so excited to invite you in and have mods painstakingly walk you through the process of downloading qbittorrent and setting up a vpn. Also they give you credit for seeding as long as you keep the file available, which is very generous. (Most other places count seeding the standard way, which means your upload number only goes up when someone else actually grabs file pieces from you. This can make it difficult to maintain "ratio" - for your uploads to be equivalent or higher than your downloads.) As always, you can always grease the wheels by donating money for server costs.
Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.
MAM specializes in ebooks and audiobooks. I don't find their ebook collection to be more impressive than Libgen or Anna's Archive, but their audiobook collection is genuinely top notch. And because of the ratio requirements, each download is incredibly speedy. I've never had a torrent take more than a minute to complete.
Personally, I haven't found a need to join any other private tracker, since I'm not super into old obscure media nor can I hear the difference between 128kbps mp3 and FLAC files.
One interesting recent casualty in this world from the LLMs is bibliotik, which used to be the premier private tracker for books. Then it got scraped and now its name is in a couple of lawsuits levied at the big AI companies, and it hasn't opened up for any new members since.