BrainDiarrhea

As a huge fan of TV shows it should surprise no one that I download most of them off of BitTorrent. Downloading of already broadcasted shows is more of a grey area than let’s say the downloading of movies or music – once a programme is broadcast its rights aren’t as strongly pursued as the rights of the previously mentioned media. The last couple of years, however, have seen the emergence of a new type of torrent providing websites – tight communities where quality matters, with strict upload rules and so-called download “credits,” aimed at providing high quality content, sprang up like mushrooms after a rain. Nevertheless, their strict download policy has some drawbacks I would like to discuss here …

The basic idea behind these “download communities” (such as TVTorrents.com or Oink) is to forcefully regulate the peer-to-peer community and to stimulate its members to upload as much, if not more, than they download. To achieve this the communities monitor the downloads and uploads a user makes and reward him or her with credits – uploading gets you credits, downloading costs credits. No doubt a great idea solving one of the biggest problems of peer-to-peer networks: everybody leeches and no one seeds in order to protect the personal costs of their internet accounts. After all, uploading also “costs” money, so why should I seed after I’ve got what I wanted?

Unfortunately, the rule and its logic are flawed, because they assume a similar turn-around for each file – in other words, the assumption is that once you download a file, the same amount of people that were downloading it with you, will want to upload it from you. This, however, is true only for the newest, hottest torrents and gets progressively worse the older a torrent gets. An example: you download a TV show that is a year old. You get it with a nice speed, let’s say 100+ kBps because many people already have it. This does not leave enough time to upload a lot during the download, so you are forced to seed, if you do not want to lose your credits. So you seed, like any other good peer-to-peer user, however, soon you realize that recovering the credits you lost due to the fast-as-lighting download will be next to impossible, because nobody wants do download such an old episode. Everybody has this episode already (hence the fast download), so nobody wants it anymore (since nobody was as stupid as you).

Now imagine you got yourself stuck in a negative credit amount, which usually means that you cannot download anything new. And imagine that you blew your credits on two seasons (> 8GB) of an old show that no one wants to download from you, which basically cost you a hell of a lot of credits. (This happened to yours truly.) So basically you are screwed, because you cannot download the new and hot stuff that people want, so you can’t seed it to regain your credits. And the only thing you can (and do) seed, no one wants. The only option is to download the files that are hot @ your current credit-based torrent provider from another, free torrent site and seed it with a torrent file from your provider. However, that only works if you can find the same exact file – and it is a pain in the ass to do …

Is it just me who thinks this credit system needs a one-time go-over? How about rewarding points for just seeding, without actually having someone download from you? Otherwise you are limiting the fans of the older shows and you are making a download of a whole season of an older show a dangerous hazard. The system itself has a good idea behind it, only the implementation lacks the finesse required by this random world …