BitTorrent Addiction: The Thrill of the Chase
Written by enigmax on October 05, 2007It’s great to have access to a huge library of media via your torrent client, no one can deny that, but for many users BitTorrent is more than just a functional tool. It’s become an addictive hobby, with puzzles to solve and treasures to find.
Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, loves puzzles - although he insists he’s not an addict. However, many users of the BitTorrent system he created can’t say they feel the same way about their new hobby.
After a brief introduction, many BitTorrent users find themselves really interested by this great system and how it all fits together. Sure, the free media BitTorrent provides is a great attraction and a positive reinforcement for continuing, but for many, the real attraction lies elsewhere.
For some hardcore torrenters, the media acquired is secondary. Enjoyable, yes - but in a post-coital cigarette-type way - the icing on the cake if you like. Sure, many torrenters just grab a torrent and come back to the PC when it’s finished but they’re blissfully unaware of where the real action is to be found. For the serious torrenters, it’s all about the thrill of the chase.
At first, the BitTorrent novice doesn’t know there are forces of evil lurking around every corner, dedicated to ensuring that his downloading experience is as difficult as possible. He (or she) is unaware that super-powerful corporations with friends in government are intent on sabotage.
He has no idea that this new hobby has such high stakes. It could potentially land him in prison or cause him to end up with a massive 6-digit fine. When the novice starts to build his knowledge of such things, it can be little bit scary - but the adrenaline flows a little and the excitement builds. The hobby becomes more intense.
With this new found energy and a little research, things become clearer for the BitTorrent student. Moving away from simply downloading, a strategy forms as he learns that for most attacks on his sharing experience, there is an effective counter-measure. So for example, any attempt to say, set up fake torrents, can be dealt with effectively by employing various counter techniques. Torrent sites start to be chosen through intelligence, not just at random.
As more experience is gathered, the BitTorrent fan will probably start to understand that organizations such as the MPAA like to deal in propaganda, and that the big headlines of being fined huge amounts or being sent to jail are not the norm. In reality, he’ll learn that the chances of coming to grief in these ways are tiny and over time, will probably come to disregard these risks.
For the more nervous torrenter, the file-sharing world can be an unforgiving place. As he learns of the many threats and people looking to profit from things like malware, he may start to put up more defenses. Terrified of getting into trouble, he may turn to services such as those offered by Peer Guardian or an anonymous VPN solution such as that offered by Relakks.
Most hobbies involve getting into the minutia and in this respect, BitTorrent is an absolute dream. On many forums, there is talk of squeezing every last little bit of performance from a BitTorrent setup - many fans are, well - fanatical about the details. Most users agree, the best way, is as fast as possible!
There are lots of things that aim to interfere with the torrent experience but thankfully, the informed BitTorrent user will pick up lots of tips and tricks along the way to help restore torrent harmony, ensuring that this hobby stays fun.
Whatever the strategy, many BitTorrent hobbyists have as much fun during the chase as they do when experiencing the media they’ve successfully snared. Although nice to have, the media isn’t always the number one importance. For some it’s just great to hoard but it’s the road to finding and obtaining the stuff that increasingly provides the pull for the torrent hardcore. The whole BitTorrent experience can be quite captivating with its technical elements, all wrapped up in a stealthy cloak-and-dagger social layer, plenty of intrigue, many new friends and lots of fun.
For some of the 21st century’s digital treasure hunters, it’s great to ‘get’ - but the journey getting there (making friends and sharing the fun with others along the way) can be better still.
Previously: Mininova.org Servers and Traffic: 2006 vs 2007
Next: TorrentSpy Traffic Plunges After US Ban
115 Responses
You did post some good points.. when I’m downloading something really hard to find or w/e, it’s the thrill of finding it, not necessarily finding it itself… or am I just sad :P
(no-one say yes)
Actually I am a bit more paranoid than nervous. Anyway, when I download something that took a lot of time to find. I am afraid to say but the most likely thing to happen is either I fall asleep. or take care of my responsibilities on other sites or RL.
No thrill here. Just life as usual.
I would agree to this article.
Often when I’m away I think which cool torrents that have been released, and can’t wait to get home and download them. Mostly TV-shows.
It’s not just the content, but the experience. Setting up the client and find the torrent with most seeders/leechers, and the best seeder/leecher ratio.
great article. you should write more original content like this.
Thanks for nice article :).
Great Read!
I can definitely relate… nice article!
Enigmax, I think you’ve nailed it.
I’ve read in several forums where BitTorrent users commented that they don’t watch or listen to half of the stuff they download. Meanwhile, they have over a Terabyte of downloads stored on their hard disks.
I’ve always thought of it as a fad, but I think your hunch of a neuro-chemical satisfaction response is probably more likely.
Excellent article!
I always have crap I never watch/listen to. It’s just nice to be hanging out with your friends and something come out in conversation, like a new movie, album, etc. And it almost always seems I have it. Also movie night with my gf seems to be not going out to blockbuster anymore, its just browsing the download folder for dvd rips.
Well been a torrent tracker administrator there is a lot more then what this article has said to torrents! Once you have got in deep enough you will find that there is a hell of a lot more to file-sharing then torrents! torrents are just the tip of the ice berg! and once you have got in deep enough you will see how addicting it can be! you file will revolve around file-sharing! (not saying that is a bad thing!)
I think the only thing this article got right was that the content does come second, and on some days ever 3rd 4th or 5th!
Good luck noods!!
Fun article. After all the name calling recently it is nice to see something like this.
I can relate well to many of your point. My “collection” has gotten seriously out of control. Not that long ago I had a couple of CDs gathering dust. A bunch of cassette tapes tossed in a box. And some old LPs with nothing to play them on. I had dropped out of the game pretty much due to the high prices of content and the poor quality.
Now I have over 130GBs of music and it keeps growing. So many groups I had never heard of. So many oldies I thought were lost forever. Types of music I didn’t even know existed.
From Napster to Morphous to Audio Galaxy to EMule to Lime Wire to WinMx to BitTorrent and probably soon to UseNet.
Heaven is finding a particular song that NO ONE else has ever shared and has been out of print for decades. Hell is thinking about what would happen if my hard drives should all fail at once.
enigmax you are dead right the psychology of the game is small world theory with infinite levels of discovery
sharing is ethical, it is a deeply justified act, it is a personal connection in an alienating network. your mother tells you to share, we all want to do it, it is pronatural
3 months ago one of our h33t uploaders ‘migel’ made a torrent AOI within which he hid a number of ’secrets’ for the downloaders to find. he got a number of responses but for the main it was not understood. it takes time and repetition to promote a resonant truth to a frequency where it becomes part of the harmonic background
today enigmax in your article you hit the bell. if i had a hammer, i’d ring it in the morning, i’d ring it in the evening all over this land, i’d ring our justice, i’d ring our freedom, i’d ring our peace between my brothers and my sisters all over this land
;D
I love the creator, he’s insanely brilliant.
yes God is Good
thank God he is on our side :D
Personally, my packrat tendencies are due to the fear that if I delete something, I won’t be able to get it again. The torrent will be dead or deleted from the site. I have deleted things and regretted it SO MANY TIMES in the past, and storage is getting cheap enough that I’d rather not worry about that anymore.
Hence, my terabyte of music I rarely listen to. It makes sense, in context.
I download out of necessity only. Of course, I never have had an addictive personality. Too many other things to worry about. =)
Yes I love looking at my bt client. Its the best thing since sliced bread… before there was only syslog on linux or defrag on windows.
Now my new addiction watching the client accumulate data… I don’t even care what I download in fact I immediately delete it after I got a 1 ratio… so I can do it all over again.
Using wireshark on it is even better than porn! This is so awesome I even stopped taking drugs or going to the toilet.
lol TF news crack me up every time.
[quote comment="181567"]Well been a torrent tracker administrator there is a lot more then what this article has said to torrents![/quote]
I totally agree!
I already cut the post down from 4 pages to a longer-than-usual length - it is indeed a complex subject.
I considered including many other elements, such as the fun monitoring for new releases and the psychology of the big sharers/releasers but you know, sometimes you have to end the article and go eat ;)
@h33t - if I had a hammer i’d certainly share it with you :D
After the good feedback I’ll certainly try to do more stuff like this. Thanks for the kind comments everyone, they keep us going!
I would fit in the ‘monitor for new releases’ you mentioned.
I barely download illegal things. Yet I find my self every day on torrent sites or other warez sites, just to see what’s new.
Anyway, nice article. I hope you’ll post the other BT addictions too. =)
Now, what we’re all waiting for here is the “are you addicted to bittorrent” test :D
Excellent Column, I can relate to that… Especially the part:
“it’s great to ‘get’ - but the journey getting there (making friends and sharing the fun with others along the way) can be better still.”
anyone having trouble with utorrent 2day?? not connecting etc..
i receive my thrill from watching the speed graph. upload vs download graph….when the graph increases exponentially and reaches its peak at 1 mbs…this is where u curse ur isp for holding u back. :)
Wow, your post is filled with on-site links. What is this, a recap or index article; the new sitemap?
Bit Torrent made evident to me that most of the media being produced is not worth consuming. There is certainly more available these days, but about the same amount of worthwhile content as there ever was. The same goes for software.
Also I think that it is an exercise in perceived value. Somebody somewhere is charging money for that album by a new artist and now you can download it without paying. Better hoard as much as possible, this stuff costs money afterall! If it were free music by some new artist would you still want it? If it is free it probably sucks, like the itunes free single of the week. But, Bit Torrent makes everything free, how do you distinguish value? Number of seeders? How new it is/How fresh is the torrent ? What prestige does the tracker/release group hold?
Torrent’s also create virtual clutter. Like a person that can’t seem to tackle that messy garage, unsure of whether to pitch that old stack of newspapers, only to curl up in a ball on the couch overwhelmed. Now we have folders full of data that MIGHT be valuable and we can’t bear to part with it.
It’s still stealing stuff, but so is listening to the radio or watching TV. I just get to watch what I want, not wait for when it’s on. Let the companies seed their own archives and put ads in and “illegal” downloading will die.
[quote comment="181761"][quote comment="181567"]Well been a torrent tracker administrator there is a lot more then what this article has said to torrents![/quote]
I totally agree!
I already cut the post down from 4 pages to a longer-than-usual length - it is indeed a complex subject.
I considered including many other elements, such as the fun monitoring for new releases and the psychology of the big sharers/releasers but you know, sometimes you have to end the article and go eat ;)
@h33t - if I had a hammer i’d certainly share it with you :D
After the good feedback I’ll certainly try to do more stuff like this. Thanks for the kind comments everyone, they keep us going![/quote]
Yeah it is a good article i had fun reading it! but like you said there is a lot of fun watching for new releases from some of the top groups! if there is a big name movies that is coming out you can always have fun thinking who is going to come out with it first but every time there are the groups that will win hands down!
You should think about making any article from when you started till when you have finished IE: to this day! i dont think i will ever finish file sharing! may be one day when torrents are old news and some new tech for downloading comes along!
Wait until you discover RapidShare…
Maxing out your connection on every download, not having to worry about private sites, ratios, uploads, slow downloads, trackers, seeds…
When you can download films in a couple minutes this addiction gets to a whole new level. I’m done with BitTorrent, it’s too slow and the fact that upload = download is stupid.
[quote comment="182102"]Wait until you discover RapidShare…
Maxing out your connection on every download, not having to worry about private sites, ratios, uploads, slow downloads, trackers, seeds…
When you can download films in a couple minutes this addiction gets to a whole new level. I’m done with BitTorrent, it’s too slow and the fact that upload = download is stupid.[/quote]
No im sorry m8! rapidshare was good but i find that there is to much bull shit to deal with when it come to it! plus with torrent s is you have a 100mbit connection you can max it out but with rapidshare there are some times that you cant!
Its all about the tracker you download from!
Yeah sure, good lucking finding peers that upload just for you with 100mbit. 99% of all internet connections are asymmetrical, which goes after everything BitTorrent is about.
Plus the fact the upload download ratio system is a failure (guess why Ponzi scheme never works). Try downloading new heroes from Mininova and you can see why BitTorrent is a failure (I can grab that in 2minutes from Rapidshare).
What “bull shit to deal with” when it comes to Rapidshare? You click a link and the download starts you don’t even need any additional software. You care about the couple euros it costs per year? Oh lad, the power you’ll save from being able to turn off your computer when you’re not on it makes up for it.
If you want to run your computer all day long seeding files to people you don’t even care about, have fun with that, I’ll enjoy my super fast downloads without any hassle.
wow this is so true , man ive spent many of night watching the media download ,then watching the media ive downloaded, ne way.
ive spent more time keeping up with the torrent community ,software updates and every tweak in the playbook to get to that magical number of KBps. then exceed it 500 by whatever means possible.
Including calling my ISP and ordering the the Fat Pipe service, and arguing with verizon guy about why Verizon wont put fios in the ghetto.( Q why cant i get fios .VG A Verizon has spent enough money “here” u better move to Boston).
Well wuteva i just want to see 1500 kBs download,
Ive just made a list of some things
Being a leech and not sharing.
Getting the magical 1.1 ratio
Leaving the first post , or trying too, on a popular torrent
seeing a commercial and trying to find the torrent
checking ur fav torrent site first,
then checking the rest
knowing the top 5 uploaders/ or team at anytime
healing virus , from some bottom of barrel torrents that usually promises something o_O
99% downloaded then stops
knowing its a fake ,virus , porn , wutever before u waste bandwidth downloading it …. priceless
…. >:P …
btw a popular torrents will download faster then Rapidshare some of the more popular tv and anime series are ridiculously fast …..and u said u didnt watch tv.
Great article, I can relate to some of it.
Great article! Never thought I had an addictive personality, but OMG the graph window on BitComet is mesmerizing! Better than anything on TV. Guess I need to get a life.
[quote comment="182132"]Yeah sure, good lucking finding peers that upload just for you with 100mbit. 99% of all internet connections are asymmetrical, which goes after everything BitTorrent is about.
Plus the fact the upload download ratio system is a failure (guess why Ponzi scheme never works). Try downloading new heroes from Mininova and you can see why BitTorrent is a failure (I can grab that in 2minutes from Rapidshare).
What “bull shit to deal with” when it comes to Rapidshare? You click a link and the download starts you don’t even need any additional software. You care about the couple euros it costs per year? Oh lad, the power you’ll save from being able to turn off your computer when you’re not on it makes up for it.
If you want to run your computer all day long seeding files to people you don’t even care about, have fun with that, I’ll enjoy my super fast downloads without any hassle.[/quote]
Well i mean m8! im talking about private trackers! you must be dumb to use that kind of speed on a pubic tracker!
reading this article gets me even more pumped up to find torrents. i want nothing more than to support this cause
and to keep the bit torrent community alive.
newservers anyone? 0day files, max speeds (if you’re isp is charitable or you subscribe), and better anonymity.
Two words for you TorrentFreaks out there (just 2):
Swarmcast Patent
(read it and weep)…
Totally agree!
After tweaking and patching, now the thrill is watching the download data and competing with peers on the speed… I must say I am a freak!
I have downloaded so much stuff that I don’t even have time to watch. So now instead of downloading popular stuff, I would hunt for some classic cults. It’s so much fun and worth the wait.
To Zerk00, yes and I don’t watch TV anymore… ahaha.. cheers for that…
“For some of the 21st century’s digital treasure hunters, it’s great to ‘get’ - but the journey getting there (making friends and sharing the fun with others along the way) can be better still.” this touched me
Great article, and too true. I consider myself still new to the torrent world, but I’m obsessed with gathering more and more files. If not for the thrill of the chase, just being able to say that I have gone through so much bandwidth (much to the frustration of my ISP, I’m sure) and have a good share ratio. It’s the one area of my life where I run some kind of risk, so there is some thrill in knowing that every day I keep my machine up there is more risk of being caught.
It’s also fun, because I’ve gotten better and better and searching for torrents and other p2p sharing on the internet, so often I will have family or friends come to me, asking to find some obscure torrent for them (or get it quickly, in the case of large files).
All my family has an addiction of some kind, and when most of them are alcohol or other harmful things, I don’t think a BitTorrent addiction looks too bad :P
nice post! if there was no file shareing i wouldnt even bother with the internet, p2p is deffantly addictive an like you say not just for the free goods but the whole thing of searching an hunting out the best stuff while avoiding them mpaa knob jockeys
yes. good job
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Yep, i completely agree. I almost have more fun finding and downloading something, than actually playing, watching, listening, or whatever’ing it. good article.
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I feel sorry for you. Your mania is more OCD than anything. You prolly have to check your shared folder 13 times before you get to sleep at night.
Oh, and for the vast majority of us, the music is more important than “The Man’s perceived value (market price).
If music could be equated with diamonds in the whole realm of something’s value in relation to it’s
availability, music files are hardly unique or valuable. So the reality that people are downloading it is likely more to do with their love of the music. Additionally, the sheer volume of music that’s been ripped by someone “out there” should render the price of a CD or DVD to be under the threshold of a dollar or so.
I have to weigh in with my agreement with the general idea behind this article. There’s nothing I love more than hunting for something I know will be nearly impossible to find. 14 tabs later and three hours late for bed, I turn off my monitor, walk the dog and say my prayers to the tracker I finally found it on before hopping into bed. And then I realize I didn’t brush my teeth and get up and do so. On the way back to bed, I wonder if I jinxed myself by peeking at the progress…. LOL
And why are idiots posting keywords… That’s for phags.
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+1! The thrill of downloading is what is it all about. Beating the system and getting away with it! FUK the RIAA! FUK the music industry! Torrents are the new standard. get used to it.
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i like when i hear that Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent.
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So true…..my small town provider was the last one to find out about file sharing I think…..at one point he called asking if i was sharing my connection with all the neighbours….think i’m going to go in and see if he’s got a special on dvd’s….im out :P
One thing you missed is that bittorrent actually measures your local bandwidth to its fullest extent and capacity. So, bittorrent easily answers questions like - how fast is my actual download speed? How fast is my actual upload speed? Just get a popular enough torrent and you’d get your answer - and with a bonus media too!
But your article pretty much described my life anyway. Damn, either you’re a good psychologist or you’ve been spying me in my bedroom.
For true pirates and treasure hunters, the gold is good, but the thrill of the chase is way more awesome!
There’s the drug. That’s the high. And our pockets our emptied with the purchase of another DVD storage or an extra HD.
Conclusion: Storage media hardware manufacturers win. Movie makers still win, but less now. Ultimately, I win.
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Indeed, it’s not so much about the data, but the whole downloading process. I personally see BT as a way to make full use of my netline, which most of the time is sitting idly and doing nothing. Like running SETI when you’re not using the resoruces of your computer for something else :)
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