Are torrent invite communities really trading in disguise?

:lol::lol: ... but I'm pretty sure I am clear about my positions, you will find my "disclaimers" are merely openness and awareness of other people's opinions :P.
 
Thank you for being one of the first to actually respond to my topic...

Polarbear said:
Internet communities with more than 100,000 members are an accumulation of random people no matter what invite policy you have or how people were invited.
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I would have to agree with Polarbear. I was under the impression that most staff didn't approve of trading simply because it breeds bad users. Invite GA's on the other hand (while avoiding the trouble of torrent invite sites) would allow higher quality users through the examination of proofs, activity, ect.

With a site of 100,000 members, can you really expect anything more than "an accumulation of random people"? And even so, the what.cd interview would seem to point out that any RIAA spy could find their way in assuming they knew their music. So how could this policy of banning invite GA's and only allowing close friends (many of which could be new to the BT scene all together, and inadequate to handle What.CD's tough competition for upload), be beneficial to the tracker? Wouldn't it just decrease the userbase of a site built on a large amount of content and retention?
 
well I'm on a particular site atm currently which is seemingly despised by BCG (atleast)...thankfully, I wasn't outright banned as I have good friends on BCG who told me the scenario beforehand

that said, I see no harm on being a member of any site - or for that matter, using them

its "what" you use the site for which changes everything...trade there and you are a bad user...hell trade here, and you are still a bad user

on the other hand, meet and chat with ppl here and you are good...if you do the same on any other site, then you are still just as good in my books...so banning members for being a member of wherever is a bit harsh but I understand its not always easy to differentiate between users so some liberty needs to be taken at some point

@Totti...precisely my point! just today I was talking to a member who's a member of a certain flac only site and he didn't even know how to rip flac music!...on the other hand, I'm not on the site - have no interest in flac - yet still know how to rip flac...now I've got nothing against that fella (he seemed like a very good guy infact) but I'd like to think, with all other things constant, I probably make a better user than him (assuming I had an interest in flac ofcourse - which I don't so that's that)

as someone once said, the world's a cruel cruel place indeed
 
I think you're looking too much into this.
These are torrent sites... basically meaningless in the world of usenet combined with megaupload.

Building rep is not trading... that's like saying giving someone a birthday gift is bribing them to still remain/become your friend.

As for trust... in this world of illegal downloading you're sure to find lots of shady people. This is the new Wild West.
 
TrollinThunder said:
I gave out one invite away on one of those secretive invite forums, aptly named Invite Central. I gave an FTN invite to someone chosen based on the fact that they had a slow home connection, which I felt would be a good fit with a ratio-free tracker. Within a week, the fucker had buffered his account with a friends seedbox to 525GBs. Over a year later, he has maybe 10GBs more. I don't know whether he leeches all the time and that is the result of his slow connection or whether he just barely touches his account now that the novelty wore off. Whatever, I couldn't do anything else with the invite except give it away to some random dude posting two ratio proofs and a speedtest.
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these days no one in the 'torrent scene' really appreciates sites for the content, especially ftn. Its simply a place to build your elite e-dentity, a trophy. its sad, because ftn is the ideal track for people with a slow home connection.
 
That's my big complaint about general tracker forums - that no one seems to care about the content .The movie and TV sections are mostly comprised of what's the last movie you watched?
Some people even put this like The.Tournament.2009.DVDRip.XviD-MoH That's not a movie that 's a release you fucking idiot.

Whew. that felt good. Been wanting to get that off my chest for a while.
 
Rart said:
We've had more trolls recently here than the lounge ever will, chalice. Let's get something going. You must've used some kind of filesharing right, otherwise how did you find this forum? Say something.
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I've used just about every form of file sharing you'd care to imagine.

In the days before time, I used to have a sticky in this section as to whether Suprnova was up or down. This was pre-private tracker days. True story. I also witnessed a lot of private trackers take shape.

I came here primarily cos there was a link in the Kazaa-Lite client to this forum. It was called KLTalk or something then.

I made a load of friends and I've never had a problem as far as p2p goes ever since. Then I went away. When I came back, the majority of the place had morphed into a trading forum.

However, many of my friends were still there, having formed bonds, and were railing, to some degree against what they know is the forum and what it is becoming.

And around and around and around she goes. Where she'll stop, no cunt knows. :01:
 
Cabalo said:
and where do you see the middleman service actively working here ?
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If the middle-men service is no longer allowed here then ok. However if the middle-man service is still being used in order to make trading safe, but at the same time members who seek to stop trading, either by posting in trade threads or by capturing IP's are banned or warned then I would say FST is actively encouraging trading.
 
Night0wl said:
Why the hate for the "Rate that movie" thread? I use it all the time and others do too for finding something to watch. Quite a few people go that step further, at least adding an IMDB link and the year, maybe even a poster and a small review without spoilers. Also I very seldom see 9 and 10 ratings unless it's older movies i.e. people having watched something, they've heard about, had recommended etc.

And BTW if you think the "rate that movie" posters on whatever site you are on are lazy, then change that by posting decent review. It's simple.
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I have absolutely no problem with the concept of a rate the movie ( or ass ) thread.
I don't know if you read the whole thread here but the whole point to my diatribe was that few people on 0day trackers seem to have any interest in the actual content .Some of the lack of meaningful posts are no doubt because many members are not fluent in English but that still doesn't excuse the other x percent .
As for my lack of recent contributions basically at some point I got tired of talking to myself.
That and I don't know if you've noticed but some of these forums aren't too open to critical posts and since an unavoidable part of film talk is criticism ( and since most recent movies, the only ones that again that the majority show any interest in, are - others words to the contrary - pretty bad ) I made a conscious decision not to be " the negative one ".:)
clocker said:
Most of the posts in a thread don't really invite/warrant a response.

Really, what can be said when someone posts "Saw Movie X, 8/10 LOL"?

I've mentioned before how useless the "x out of 10" rating system is since we have no clue what the "10" might be...Citizen Kane or Paul Blart: Mall Cop?
Makes a difference.

It also matters why you liked (or disliked) a movie since it's possible to love a crap film for good reasons- and vice-versa- but most folks don't bother telling us anything about their reasoning, so basically, you can respond with either "You're a moron" or "I sooo totally agree!".

Most of a thread is just Twitter without the immediacy..."Got up, took a dump, went and saw Transformers2, felt unclean...".
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What he said

I understand that people have differing views , not everyone is going to like what I like but really , how can I answer a post about Terminator Salvation without saying something that the person who wrote it won't want to hear.

PS on topic Just to clarify a point TPS succeeds because it co-operates with trackers and not because of it's lack of traders .
Correct me if I'm wrong but not doing it openly and not doing it are two entirely different things.
 
it seems to me its alot like breaking into any kind of entertainment industry. you have to have experience to get gigs but to get experience you have to do gigs.
i completely understand the admins of these sites points of view as far as their dislike of public giveaways but in the real world im not used to anything for free. everything seems to have a cost. trading invites to me seemed just a logical means of obtaining whatever access you needed. you have something i want and i have something you want.

basically giving invites to build rep just so you can get invites is the exact same as trading, you are taking a much bigger risk but it seems more socially acceptable. its ok to get drunk but dont smoke weed. if you dont think that building rep is the same as trading then would you be so eager to give those invites out if the rep system didnt exist?
 
For most part i agree with OP observation and interpretion of what is going on here in FST giveaway forum and what goes on in those secret invite forum. This thread may start a new way to view those activities
 
cinephilia said:
last time i checked, discussions were way more "intellectual" here than on any invites forum where ass kissing and hypocritical congratulations seems to be the norm..
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For most it's true. And it's not about asskissing as much as it's about the actual absence of intelect at most sites. 2+ line posts are a rarity and it's not only cause people try to inflate their post count; some are not fluent in english, others just don't have anything to say.
 
while i agree with Whatman about the inconvenients of such processes, no one can deny the fact that without GAs and trades, what.cd would never have 100.000+ members at the present time.

PS: great topic Rart, i 100% agree with your analyze.
 
WhatMan said:
You are absolutely 100% correct. The worst example I've seen of this is on a site called TTInvite, where invites are exchanged for 'invite points', and any user 'giving away' an invite can stipulate the number of invite points they want to receive in return. This basically means that trading is similar to a bartering-based economy, and invite giveaway communities are currency-based economies.

Then, the invite communities act all righteous and claim that "we're not causing any harm, we ban trades, we only do giveaways!"

The thing is, tracker staff who've given the issue some thought don't dislike trades any more than giveaways. Both of them are equally bad in our eyes, because both of them fundamentally undermine the reasons the torrent sites are invite only in the first place.

Torrent sites are invite-only because the admins need to keep the site secure and keep the economy working. Once random people start getting invited in, no matter if it's a trade or a giveaway, both of those pillars start collapsing. This is why the so-called 'anti-traders' who think they're all cool because they only give away invites really get to me.
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they post announcement.i think what.cd hates ttinvite.but this forum is responsible for what.cd.they banned what.cd invte give away from ttinvite:whistling:whistling:whistling:whistling

in news section they make post -what-cd-invites-forbidden
 
kooltilldend said:
ooh fancy thread...well if people don't want invites given thru trades and dislike giveaways as well...then how the heck are people supposed to get into new sites?

i dunno anyone irl who uses torrents...so does that mean I shouldn't be on any tracker anywhere? well I don't trade, my ratio's are fine (mostly anyways lol)...I'm fairly well known (in a good manner) on the sites I care about and so on and so forth...in short, I think I'm a fairly decent user/member who makes for a good person to be on torrent trackers...so just 'coz I know of nobody who uses torrents, it means I don't deserve to get in either?

can't say I agree there
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Wow this thread got resurrected :blink:

As to the posts about TTinvite (which got this thread back up), whatever the hell that is, please don't turn this thread into flames about it.

KTD, I think you are misunderstanding what I am saying. Giveaways are fine. When they don't have ulterior motives behind them. If some upstanding member here at FST who doesn't live in the BTinvites section occasionally decides to be generous and do a giveaway based on good will, thats fine (honestly that's a little idealist but as long as it's not blatant it's fine).

The problem occurs when you enter an invite site and the entire perspective changes. No longer are invites given based on good will. Torrent invite forums, in the simplest of terms, turn into a game. It's no longer a place to turn to and "discuss" bittorrent. Everyone is there for one sole purpose: obtaining invites to better sites. People furiously give out invites, often without any care, getting banned when they invited cheaters into their cherished sites. Why do they give out invites so carelessly? Because they want rep points in exchange. That's the root of the problem. Everyone is judged not by their traits, but by a numerical value as impersonal as how many rep points or how many GA threads you have. What's the easiest way to obtain a better status, in order to get the sites you want? Do more giveaways.

In this regard, I find it nearly indistinguishable from trading. People are giving away invites fully knowing and expecting what they will be paid with in return. When they give away invites, they demand rep in return. Ultimately, albeit a bit more indirectly, by exchanging these invites you are getting rep points that will pay you back later with better invites. Trading is the same thing. You give an invite, fully expecting something beneficial to you in return. Where do you draw the line between this kind of behavior and trading? I don't know. Do you?

As a side note, even on sites that seem to fare better than others in terms of discussion, still don't provide me with what I'm looking for. The sites feel stilted at best, as if people are forced to artificially post something they believe is "constructive". I don't want someone to constantly be breathing behind my back and making sure my posts are approved. I want to post whatever the hell I want.

Just my thoughts.
 
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