@ianfontinell I agree with most of what you have said.
There is a whole cycle at play here which is contributing to the overall decline in the site.
An overwhelming amount of content of dubious value to the site is being uploaded on a daily basis so new torrents are getting pushed off the first pages in a matter of hours, and as a result they are attracting fewer and fewer downloaders. Users who download them are not getting enough leechers and their ratio is suffering. This is a particular issue for badly titled torrents which don’t show up in searches.
It's next to impossible to fix your ratio just by seeding downloaded torrents under these circumstances. So to fix their ratio users are uploading more and more junk torrents, which is just adding to the problem of too much content being uploaded.
These junk torrents seed ok for a few hours while they are on the first pages, then they quickly get pushed to page 5 and start to die. The users who downloaded them are seeding but they don't get leechers, and so more users are pulled into the bad ratio spiral.
These users will either abandon the site altogether, or consider adding to the already overwhelming mountain of junk being uploaded.
Users who upload to fix their ratio quickly realise that their uploads are only seeding healthily for a very short time (because they are generally junk) so uploading a 500mb video won’t help their ratio very much. Instead they create a 40gb collection of random stuff from their hard drive and share that. It might attract just 7 leechers, but it will get them 40gb of upload credit, but in the process will trash the ratios of the 7 other users… and the spiral continues.
Without drastic action this cycle is only going to get worse, and I don't know if the will and the ability to take action exists here.
I used to be a moderator on a private tracker, which was a thankless job and resulted in me getting death threats (gotta love the sewer that is internet discourse). It required strict 24/7 moderation, even an hour without proper moderation caused problems. I am well aware of all the internal politics and power struggles which stifle change and exasperate problems. While, I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes here, from the outside I can see all the problems of an unmoderated private tracker that are all too familiar to me.
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