id say the primary reason for the decline of what.cd downloads was their draconian ratio restrictions, meaning that as a new account (or even old, if you weren't able to take advantage of free leech from times past, which quickly dried up into "neutral leech" without granting ratio) it was almost impossible to actually use the site.
What.cd's ratio model was zero sum, so in order for you to get ratio, somebody else has to lose it. In Economic terms that means the entire "ratio economy" freezes up and its very hard to do much of anything.
It was a continual, deep flaw with the site that admins refused to acknowledge, i hope any successors keep it in mind.
Getting punished for actually using the site and seeding makes no sense whatsoever.
Freeleeches (you get upload credit, without being counted for downloads, in the same way), tokens (get to download a free item), and uploading original material (you get credit (potentially) without ever having downloaded) would inject new resources into the economy. Also having someone leave the site with <1 ratio effectively injects resources. However, If someone with a surplus left, it would hurt.
edit: just explaining terms for non site members, but you're right, definitely something you need to get right. Too strict and the economy dies, too permissive and there isn't incentive.
I lost my account there many years ago due to leaving torrents behind, and I had a few TB surplus ratio, and I've learned many times that I'm not a special snowflake, so I tend to agree with GP, that ratio game really stifled the flow of data(if flow is the metric you want to reach). True of most private trackers.
A friend of mine was once a member of a similar tracker geared towards television (though I cannot seem to think of the name of it right now) where there were no ratios, only a minimum amount of time required to seed after a leech. He said that this system worked a bit better than the classic ratio system.
The rule changes made... around 2 years ago now I think? Kinda made this complaint obsolete.
They changed it to allow your ratio to dip well below the "required" ratio as long as you kept seeding. Keeping your ratio up wasn't strictly necessary anymore - though it was still required to keep your "rank" and the little perks that came with that. The admins did this largely in response to their inability to "fix" the ratio economy that overly disadvantaged people with low bandwidth.
I always felt so annoyed at the stupidity of the ratio requirements that I do feel some vague satisfaction imaging that it destroyed them (I have no idea what actually happened to cause a shutdown). Everyone buying seedboxes so that they could have fast enough internet to actually earn ratio was ridiculous.
Broadcasthenet still has no ratio requirements at all and is doing fine.
Broadcast the net has a very strict 1 week seeding policy on every download though which makes having a dedicated seedbox almost a requirement. Having been flush with what.cdupload after stocking up years ago on big freeleech files, I kinda preferred the ratio model but can definitely see how it could be restricting for new users.
This was definitely an issue at PTP. You start off with whatever you got invited with as a gift, and if you don't start making up ground quickly, you're basically in a hole, except by freeleech. I realized I had to pay attention to freeleech and participate that way, which worked pretty well, until I built up a suitable buffer, but it takes some doing.
This restriction hindered my usage of the site for a long time, and I ended up "getting around it" by actively waiting for freeleech events and grabbing as much as I possibly could during that time. With everyone else downloading as well, it was entirely possible to build up significant upload credit.
One way to get upload credit was to get the users who exploited the ambient genre by automatically downloading every ambient album to download fabricated paulstretch albums.
There are people who use Private Trackers who don't understand the point, don't give back to the community, only seed things they personally want, and wonder why they have a hard time building ratio...basically use it like a public tracker that they can get "locked out" of.
i uploaded dozens of albums to what.cd, it didn't help with my ratio in the slightest, because some seed-box grabs one copy, then they take all the rest of the ratio because they have much faster internet than me. Out of everything i uploaded, with all qualities/encodes included, i got maybe 2-3GB of ratio.
Again, what is the point of a torrent site that punishes you for actually using it, even if you are fully willing to contribute via seeding, or albums, etc.
As a heavy user for years, sorry, the what.cd system was fundamentally broken if you didn't have a fast seed-box to slurp up ratio fron everyone else. Because its zero sum, the seedboxes win, and everyone else loses. Which is totally insane when bits are 100% free things that can be copied endlessly, isn't that the whole point of BitTorrent to begin with?!
I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks. I had the upload and actually had to wait out the time restriction. I had uploaded and transcoded/cross-seeded hundreds of albums.
You have to give a lot more than you take - and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.
> and yes, seedboxes are doing more than you in the "giving" aspect.
Are they? Surely after a certain point, adding more bandwidth to the network doesn't make a difference. If you add another fast seedbox, maybe some people could download an album 5 seconds faster, but that's only if they could pay the ratio for the album in the first place, which they might not be able to if they weren't a seedbox user themselves. I think what.cd had more than enough seedboxes and that it probably would have been more important to the community to upload new 100% FLAC rips or seed unpopular or poorly seeded torrents than to add another seedbox that just auto-snatched popular/2016 releases and freeleech torrents.
> I was an Elite member (100GB+ upload), without any seedbox, within 2 weeks.
Remember, not everyone has a good enough home internet connection to do this. Back-of-the-napkin calculations say, even if I spent the whole time uploading at full speed, my shitty 0.5 Mb/s connection would still take more than 2 weeks to upload 100GB.
Point is, there's no low-powered user option. You can't be a casual and survive. I can't just engage every few months when I feel like it if I have to pay a subscription. A user has to put in a lot of effort BEFORE they get anything out, and then has to keep up that effort.
What use is a glorious library if you have to work there for free a few days a week before they let you read any of the books?
>A user has to put in a lot of effort BEFORE they get anything out, and then has to keep up that effort.
Fill a request whenever you need more upload. There are many low hanging fruits for 25-75GB and $15-35. Requests are "high value" uploads that don't rely on you seeding to multiple people, just uploading and claiming the reward. Very low effort and sometimes the requester even links you to where you can purchase the material.
Requested uploads hold more value to the community (or at least a single member) than {random local band that had two shows and gave out poorly mixed CD's one time}.
I was a What.cd member years ago (early college) and had two issues: 1) disk space, 2) connectivity/laptop
It was hard to maintain content long enough to seed if you want to consume content but don't have much disk space. And with just a laptop it can be hard to keep an internet connection to seed.
Eventually it became more effort than it was worth and I just used the top charts to find the music elsewhere. tbh I haven't since found a better source for high quality music recommendations.
Very. Even downloading new releases on the top charts, I found that I could only get about 1-5% seeded in an entire month. Unless you're one of the first 10 people to start seeding that torrent, it's basically hopeless to get a high ratio just from that.
What.cd's ratio model was zero sum, so in order for you to get ratio, somebody else has to lose it. In Economic terms that means the entire "ratio economy" freezes up and its very hard to do much of anything.
It was a continual, deep flaw with the site that admins refused to acknowledge, i hope any successors keep it in mind.
Getting punished for actually using the site and seeding makes no sense whatsoever.