That fits my question perfectly. What is inferred from your answer is that constant freeleech places are giving people an opportunity to grab the stuff they really like, and drop the buffering part. On one side, this is a very positive outcome as it doesn't force people to download what they don't want, and reflects the true traffic that the site should have. On the other side, it also means that on many non-freeleech places, much (if not most) of the traffic is actually buffering traffic, which is a bit sad imho.
So what's the answer? Are freeleech/share-ratio sites destined to have low traffic just because they allow people to grab only the stuff they really want to? Is there a way to boost traffic on such sites while keeping the community tightknit, assuming the content is decent?
Interesting thread this.
The bit I highlighted in your post above possibly has quite a lot to do with the issue here, and is indeed more than a bit sad if you ask me. The ratio system as it was originally intended made a lot of sense, however in these days where it seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry has a seedbox to abuse it no longer really means anything. I remember when having a 1.05 ratio meant you were the ideal user, and only uploaders were really expected to have significantly more than that, or applauded for doing so. Those were the days *old git smiley*
So nowadays, on many ratio-based sites, especially those considered to have worth on silly levels lists or e-penis meters, it really does seem like a hell of a lot of the traffic is from people trying to build up TB buffers by downloading a ton of stuff, most of which they can surely never use/watch/listen to. On sites without ratio there is little point in them doing this, so there may well be a noticeable decrease in the overall volume of leeching going on. Those sites may well attract some users with poor home connections who will only download what they actually want to watch, but as a result speeds will probably not be the best, especially a few days after the initial upload. This may not be such a problem on specialist trackers, but on general 0-day ones, where the same content can be found on hundreds of other sites, high volume downloaders and/or those with faster connections are likely to go elsewhere.
So ultimately, I think a lot of the no-ratio sites are on a bit of a hiding to nothing. They've identified that on other sites, some users are apparently "afraid" to download things they may be unable to share back, and believe a freeleech system will be attractive to those people especially. But the more of those users they attract, the more speed and ratio-whores may get turned off as a result. And once a tracker, offering the same material as many others, becomes known for poor-retention, poor download speeds, and often perhaps quite a lot of h&r, no amount of free-leech in the world will make up for that in many people's eyes.*
I'm not sure there particularly is an answer to this, other than providing a site where the content is unique enough, the community strong enough, and the ethos focused enough on simply sharing the things you enjoy with other like minded people. Hell, that worked (and still does a bit) for some non-torrent based p2p communities (Soulseek for example) where ratio was never even thought of, so it must be possible for a torrent site.
*This is obviously not true of all non-ratio sites, but I see those as exceptions rather than the norm.
It does suffer from slow speeds though.. and I mean in some cases reeeaaally slow speeds.