Are you asking about why private trackers are private or are you asking about why a handful of people were mean to you who also happened to use a private tracker?

Edit: typo

Nearly all the rules members need to follow (which can vary from one tracker to another) are about seeding enough. That’s the main universal thing. Not allowing people to “Hit and Run”. For a member to do that, it typically takes dedicating some substantial drive space and seed time. Far more than most people are willing/able to dedicate. This allows the tracker to curate a large library of high quality material. That’s the primary ideology.

Secondary to that, it has the added benefit of making sure everyone involved is “cool”. Cool as in, not a nark who’s going to get people sued and the site shut down. That used to be a big issue. I don’t know if it is now. I’m kind of out of touch with public torrent sites.

As to why we’re insufferable elitists? What do you want me to say? Rulers’ gonna rule.

deleted by creator

TIL I’m elitist and insufferable

I’ve heard people saying they like to have a smaller number of high quality users for long term stability. I’ve even heard people tell they’re designed to keep government and federal agents away.

These are both true, although the second one isn’t “government agents” but “third party companies hired by rightsholders like the RIAA/MPA.”

I’ve even heard people tell they’re designed to keep government and federal agents away.

more likely that they are trying to stay off the radar of big ip holders. That is who would shine the feds eye of sauron on you and if the feds want to look at your files they will.

People call private tracker users gatekeepers a lot. While thats true sometimes, its bullshit most of the time IMO. There are some trackers with open signups (sometimes), some require interview to join and some provide free invites to all users. If you join one, you get a chance to join another one. There are some that are “impossible” to join, but who cares if they want to stay small or whatever. Private trackers are not gold mine, almost all content is available elswhere, sometimes trackers go down or site is not working, sometimes they disappear forever.

Tracker wouldnt be private if anyone can join, having too many people might lead to take down. Having more people than needed (for healthy tracker) is just extra risk probably. Users more likely keep their account(s) healthy and follow the rules (like ratio and hit&run), they donate to tracker and they are willing to pay for a seedbox, thats why its better than public trackers IMO. All (10+) people I have invited got banned because they didnt care about anything there (mostly inactivity for months) and they are happy with public trackers or they moved to a payed service.

Private trackers are not for everyone, if you cba go for public or pay for usenet. If you are into movies/tv shows, setup *arr stack with VPN and public trackers and you will enjoy it the same way as anyone on private trackers. If you are nerd like me and have patience, dont mind keeping your torrent client online look into private trackers

I used to visit an specialized private tracker that went offline, deli.sh, it’s had only food content, like video courses and a lot of books. Everything had at least a couple of seeders, so even that ultra rare French language pastry book was available to download. My girlfriend, now wife, was on cooking academy and I downloaded a lot of books and courses for her that would be unavailable anywhere else on the internet. I don’t think you can really have that kind of collection on a public tracker.

It is hard to find films with specific languages on public trackers. They are private one in some languages only.

I was a member of What.CD back in the day, and holy fuck, the elitism was insufferable… but the amount of genuine lossless music was unlike anywhere else, and the site was so well organized.

There’s also a “I’m not going to get some bullshit masquerading as the movie I was looking for.” thing in place.

I belong to a couple private trackers. I use them nearly exclusively and have never once downloaded a bullshit file/virus/whatever. It’s happened a couple times on public ones.

I know who the good uploaders are and know that seeding on the private isn’t going to get me flagged to my ISP, which happened twice before going off public.

I guess what I’m wondering is: why wouldn’t you use one if you can find what you’re looking for?

Is it just mere elitism to feel superior or are there any other reasons?

Security concerns are a part of it. The idea is that there’s an added layer of security if everyone is a friend of a friend, but obviously it’s not very practical. Generally the security is added by making sure you’re drafting from an “in”-crowd, which usually means familiarity with the content hosted and how the content is generated (like the old what.cd test) in addition to being a member in good standing in a tracker or a proven history of seeding. User limits also make the need for people to be very into the specific content type in order to make sure even the more obscure content is well seeded.

It’s bullshit. You’ll get 99% of the content well seeded on a relatively open private tracker like IPT or Torrentleech as you would on BTN and anyone who says otherwise just wants to feel they are part of the cool kids club or whatever.

And certain nzb indexers are even more annoyingly elitist, see nzbs.in who get mad and ban users for even mentioning their name.