[amy_petrik]

>This tilts the balance on the whole enough to maintain the health of the network. If you change these, you'd need to introduce other mechanisms to preserve the network incentives.

This is the real key point here. In the P2P wars, only bittorrent was the winner (though the old networks still live on and you can find interesting stuff in them...) - the timeless lesson is leeches need to be getting the short end of the stick, people who give back, the prize bonus. It's a fundamental characteristic of human nature here, tragedy of the common leech or something like that

[fragmede]

ish? it's pretty stupid that in the age of seedboxes with gigabit we still prioritize that. The only way to be a seed these days is to get the release microseconds after it gets released, and download it before everyone else gets their hands on it, so you can upload to them. Everyone else then has to download from you, but since everyone that's more than slightly involved has a seedbox with symmetric gigabit, the issue of leeches just isn't the same as it was before in the dial up and DSL era. That the culture hasn't been able to evolve past that, and hangs on to such outdated notions is disappointing. I'm not saying people shouldn't be incentivized to give back. Leeches suck. But in this land of plenty, theres this problem of being unable to seed because there's just too many seeders trying to seed.