[leokennis]

I enjoyed OiNK and What.cd but ultimately their ratio requirements killed that joy.

At some point the “market” was saturated. 99% of music was on the site, and every release had plenty of seeders and peers.

Unless you had early access to new releases, or maybe a seedbox with insane bandwidth and storage, it was almost impossible to actually meaningfully seed.

For me the only working strategy was to download What.cd releases from other torrent sites, then “downloading” the release from What.cd and then wait weeks until I had seeded enough to be able to “afford” one new download.

[xzel]

It was incredibly easy to get upload credit for seeding freeleech torrents (which included 10-20 albums of staff picks once a month or so) or re-encoding releases that were missing v2 or 320 encodings and scripts would pick up the releases. You could also just watch for new releases or follow trends and you'd easily get 5-10x ratio seeds. Also, you can get a $5/m seedbox to keep your downloads alive and you'd easy get back to 1.0 ratio assuming it wasn't some truly unlistenable album. I had a ratio of like 15 or something on what by leaving my computer on. At no point was it impossible or even difficult to get upload credit on any of these websites unless you were just leeching/turning off uploads. I just pulled up a larger site and I have 15 TB up, 1.15 TB down, and I'm doing absolutely nothing besides downloading stuff and deleting the torrents once I need space.

[leokennis]

Reading your reply, I think we have different definitions of “incredibly easy”.

[vegenaise]

i permaseeded everything i grabbed for 7 years or i dunno, from the beginning of the site til the end. i never uploaded a single thing. just maybe 300gb of v0 albums accumulated over time, seeding 24/7 forever. it got me hundreds of gb of buffer. zero effort. slow home connection. it was easy.

[inigyou]

Newer torrent sites try to solve this with rewards for long-term seeding, which also helps keep the site alive but isn't zero-sum like the ratio.

[IshKebab]

Yes I remember even at the time people were laughing about the hilarious requirement for everyone to have a seed ratio greater than 1. Those sites were basically unusable for people who came to them later.