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Comment by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK | Hacker News Reader

But you also need to find the file first. And sites to search for files are unreliable, often get banned. I remember long before bit torrent there were protocols like napster, edonkey, imesh etc that included search function and were superior to bit torrent in this aspect. Unfortunately, bad design won.

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> But you also need to find the file first

No. He's describing a distributor's options. You are describing a consumer's problem. Specifically pirate comsumers.

He doesn't need to find his own file; he needs to distribute it. Publishing is a separate issue. With napster, you only had one publishing option: napster.com. With torrents, you have many. As he said, "just dump the magnet link somewhere".

> Unfortunately, bad design won.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Napster and bittorent are different tools that solve different problems.

He's describing general issues involved in distributing something.

You're describing specific issues involved in stealing.

Saying "bad design won" is like saying hammers are a bad design compaired to hypodermic needles because you can't use a hammer to inject yourself with heroin.

Well, like it or not, stealing is 99.9% of practical usage of bittorrent.

Qbittorrent client has a built in search engine. Add the jackett plugin and you can search every public tracker in one click.

I haven't visited a torrent site in years.

This is cool, but unfortunately the best content is on private trackers (you also need them to reduce the risk of abuse reports to your provider).

Not sure if the need to use private trackers can be fixed by the protocol, though. But, maybe adding a bit more of anonymity would be enough? i2p torrents provide that, but sacrifice speed. Clearly it's a spectrum and we need more "points" in the middle of it.

I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 20 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.

It depends on how niche your tastes are, or how specific you are about quality. Getting Blu-Ray REMUX files for smaller, forgotten movies on public trackers is nigh impossible in my experience. Meanwhile, private trackers gives the community incentive to seed these large torrents with tiny swarms.

It is probably a matter of what kind of content you're after. I do retro game preservation and private trackers are often the only option for certain sets and certainly the most up to date ones.

I disagree completely. I downloaded my first torrent months after the first client was released and my latest yesterday. In those 17 years I've never failed to find what I need and never had any problems with ISP(and would use a VPN if I did). I've never felt the need to check out private trackers.

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