Can anyone help me understand the benefits of joining a private tracker? I get it for music, or ebooks, etc. More niche stuff can be hard to find (even less niche stuff, in fact). But for TV or movies I don’t think I’ve ever really had trouble finding something. Always able to find something high quality, always with plenty of seeders. Even old obscure British shows, etc.

Also, unrelated, but I set up Claude with some tools for searching for torrents and managing my downloads. It’s interesting. If I word my request bluntly, it’ll refuse on copyright grounds, but if I ease it in and get it to search for info about the show first, “does there happen to be a good download available for this”, etc, then it’ll happily suggest the best rip, the source with the most seeders, even “the one it would pick”.

For TV or movies the benefits of a private tracker are minimal. You can definitely get by with only a public tracker.

The slight advantages are:

- On average I find the download speeds faster and the seeders more reliable. Say for example a torrent has 2 seeders 0 leechers -- on a public tracker I might not even attempt it, but on a private tracker that has a good chance of being a very fast download.

- A bit more selection if you're picky about formats, size, etc. If you're trying to download The Godfather Pt. 1 for instance, you can find that anywhere. But if you want a specific file format of a specific size to quality ratio, you're more likely to find that on a private tracker.

- Private trackers usually have some sort of request system if you really can't find something anywhere. Presumably someone will eventually satisfy that request. This can be hit or miss though since not every tracker has appropriate incentives to request fulfillers.

I mostly only torrent ebooks/audiobooks, and I use MAM. I haven't run into anything on MAM that I couldn't find on Anna's Archive or a public tracker like AudiobookBay. But I still use MAM since it has a higher chance of having the specific file format I prefer (m4b), and being a very fast download.

There's a lot of content on private trackers that's not available on the public internet, especially when it's more local or obscure content. You'll always find the latest US tv shows or Hollywood movies everywhere, and will for many years but when you want to look for things like Austrian movies from the 80s, a specific country edition of a given CD or a vinyl ripped with a specific turntable and needle you'll need to be on a private tracker or private forum.

If that's not what you are after, it's not worth it. It's just a very specific hobby.

Movies? If you want Blu-Ray remuxes or ISOs (you do, cf 2nd paragraph) of non-mainstream stuff, it can be a bit hard on public trackers.

But I do somewhat agree with you that you get less for you effort with TV/movies, since in my experience, there's less focus on quality: encoders really don't know what they're doing compared to the anime world and metadata is often partial/absent (I rarely see the BD provenance and almost never internally hosted screenshots).

Are you american?

Here in the balkans, if you want anything local, you must find some private sharing site/tracker/forum with magnet links/etc., since no one really leaves stuff seeding on eg. piratebay for a long time (private trackers force you in a way), so much of the stuff becomes unavailable very soon.

The new avengers movie or whatever "globally popular" will always be available on every public tracker, but trying to find a good quality version of "Hajde da se volimo" is a pain :)