alt Hacker News> Friends in other private trackers, including RED, inform me that actually maintaining ratio isn't that hard! I'm not sure why this would be the case, so I don't really believe them.
If, say, you have tons of torrents seeding all the time, and you don't download very often, how is that hard to believe?
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The easiest way to get upload on trackers is to upload your own content, on Red that's not very complicated if you have access to a library or another more obscure source of CDs that might not exist on the site yet.
The other way that requires more storage and longer term commitment is just to seed everything you download forever, including things that you grab on freeleech events or with tokens (A "bonus" given out on Red that you can redeem for a free download).
Unlike public trackers, private trackers are largely filled with seeders with very few leechers. If 50 people have a file and one person goes to download you are only getting a tiny slice of that at best and for small files there may not even be enough chunks to get anything at all.
It makes no sense to me since bandwidth is so cheap compared to 20+ years ago and I think the incentives should instead encourage variety and availability like a distributed, highly-available, P2P archive.