[DavidNielsen]

I’d posit that such a setup will lead to users with low speed connection or connections which aren’t online constantly to be banned or required to buy a pardon from the site when not fulfilling the seeding requirement (as every site policy I’ve seen required maintaining a ratio over time).

This happens because users with high speed connections are incentivized to seed well beyond 1:1 and thus there is rarely any demand for seeding. Downloading is super fast which just exasperates the problem as your share ratio drops below the acceptable rate quickly.

Thus such sites tend to make their money off the people who can likely afford it the least, while rewarding people with the disposable income required to live in a neighborhood with unlimited high speed internet and pay for said service.

There’s also the matter of keeping content alive to consider. I’d consider it much more valuable to keep content with no or relatively few seeders alive than incentivizing seeders to add additional bandwidth to already popular torrents. I has not seen an site policy which encourages this, rather it likely punishes such activities as it bans users who are trying to reach a required share ratio without constant demand thus taking the content offline rather than keeping it available.

Whether or not Project Atlas will enable incentives for all users and multiple scenarios or if it will simply perpetuate a similar system to what is seen in the private torrenting communities remains to be seen.