Private Torrent Sites Overemphasize Share Ratios According to Bram Cohen
Written by Ernesto on October 12, 2006Bram Cohen, inventor of the BitTorrent protocol believes that private torrent sites should stop tracking the ratios of their users the way they do now. He argues that the sites are overemphasizing the importance of the upload / download ratio, which fosters the creation of ratio cheating software, and calls it “extremely destructive”.
Bram Cohen told Zeropaid:
“[Leechers are] engaging in perfectly reasonable and non-destructive behavior and the site is trying to punish him for it, thus fostering the creation of clients which lie about their statistics. This is the site’s fault, and the result could do serious damage to the value of BitTorrent statistics generally. Sites which do this are being extremely destructive, and the way they grandstand about how they’re fostering sharing really ticks me off.”
According to Bram the nature of the BitTorrent protocol is built to prevent freeriding. Its Tit-for-Tat algorithm makes sure that you only upload pieces of the file to people who offer something to you. The more you upload to others, the more you receive. By overestimating the importance of the share ratio, it becomes almost impossible for some to actually reach a decent share ratio.
He continues:
“Just a little bit of threatening to ban people can get the overall balance to be very heavily weighted on the side of uploading, making it difficult for people to accomplish a reasonable amount of upload even if they try.”
To prevent overseeded torrents from “messing up” peoples ratio Bram suggest an alternative method to calculate the share ratio:
“When a client reports new downloads to the tracker, the tracker can multiply the amount by (number of current peers total - number of current seeds) / (number of current peers total) and add that to the ‘total downloaded’. This results in most people having a ‘ratio’ of more than 1, but that isn’t actually a problem unless you’re more interested in mathematical purity than practical behavior.”
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55 Responses
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I’m just curious…for private sites, if users shouldn’t care about share ratios, what others incentives or bonuses can the site admins offer their users? Say for example, if members upload torrents or donate some money, what are some of the incentives they can be offered besides adding “GB upload” to help their ratios?
Some trackers will don’t allow you to download more than X torrents at the same time because of your poor ratio.. so you must wait until X is over and you can still got the torrents .. this is stupid, you keep it to minimum only for not getting kicked out.
Somes private trackers have group buys , they pay for some products that will be exclusive for them. Depending of your users class, you will need to wait X time until the torrent is available for you. The ratio will affect your class type to get materials more faster. Donor have free ratio download. For preventing the hit and run(new member enter and download all what he can until banned), they have also trusted / untrusted user , when someone is trusted , he can download exclusive stuff, for preventing a little bit more leaking and hit and run. This is not perfect , but i found this a good way to keep something you buy under control for a certain time. One day it will leak anyway. Problem is that people always want thing for free .. internet is a good way but sometime you need to make an effort on your side too to keep the quality and the community.
Now the problem is my ISP is turning off the unlimited access .. this will be hard to maintain a good ratio with this.
If your upload sucks, you shouldn’t be downloading as much. Most sites (even the ubernazis OINK) have a 2:1 ratio requirement, which is quite fair.
Furthermore, the ratio requiremnts have nothing to do with making downloading faster, they are there to keep torrents alive longer.
The bittorrent tit-for-tat protocol encourages fast downloads, but it has no encouragment to keep torrents seeded once they’ve finished.
If it takes 6 months to get a 1:1 ratio, you can bet people are going to leave the torrent open that long. Once you have many torrents seeding, it’s easier to keep your ratio up, as statistically a few torrents will be uploading at all times. This time-lag before your ratio approaches 1:1 is why sites have grace-periods for their ratio reqiurements.
People are rational beings. They join private sites with ratio-requirements because thoes sites have better seeded torrents, which makes those sites more popular. Indeed, by emphasising specifically download/upload ratio, economics dictates that people *will* upload more, via faster connections, leaving them open longer, and allocating bandwidth more aggressivly.
simpqa
Listen up. This is the real situation. You download stuff that seeders are willing to share but not very many want to download. What happens is, even if you’re willing seed what you have just downloaded, you end up waiting for nothing because nobody else wants that file at that very moment.
So how long do you have to wait then? A month? If you don’t have a life then it would work. I can’t leave my pc online forever just to get a good ratio.
Bram Cohen’s suggestion may very well be the way to go.
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