simply handing out invites gets you in trouble. If you know the other guy, he may invite you, but otherwise you should go with the official interview process (https://interviewfor.red). Also checkout https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenSignups to find some small entry trackers.. gain some reputation by being a good citizen on those. Take screenshots of your account stats every now and then. Then you can try asking for an invites to other trackers by providing your stats and stuff. The tracker communities are small and have to look out for each other. If you have no record whatsoever, the trust is too small to be invited. Also you risk your own account by inviting random people. There is also orpheus, an alternative to red that is a bit easier to get into.

I wish :( Unfortunately, pretty much all of the sites have rules regarding giving away invites to people on public forums and such. And many will claim to ban your entire invite tree if someone breaks any serious rules.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone else offered an invite. I am sure a fair number of HN people have accounts, but since RED has a relatively easy official route, I would go with that option if it's something you can find the time for; it'd suck to potentially build up an active account somewhere just to end up banned because your inviter also happened to invite someone else who did someone silly, like sell their account, etc.

There are lots of little random smaller trackers that have open signups, which you can usually find on Reddit, as roboyoshi mentioned. They'll vary in quality a lot, though, but occasionally there is something interesting there.

Other than open signups and person-to-person invites, most trackers have some sort of official invitation route. Typically this is just having an account on --insert partnered site-- for X months, don't get banned, have a minimum amount of data downloaded/uploaded.

In addition, as far as useful trackers go that have regular pathways without knowing anyone or having any account on any site, the ones below are the only ones I am super aware of.

IRC invites:

  - RED; general music

  - MyAnonamouse; ebooks/audio books/sheet music

  - BakaBT; anime

Regular open signups:

  - AvistaZ/ExoticaZ/CinemaZ; AZ is great for people who like Asian movies, and they have a Discord where they announce open signups, which is usually a couple of times a month

Relatively lax invite rules:

  - Jpopsuki; East Asian music

Donation signups:

  - M-Team; movies, tv, adult content <-- good pathway into the Chinese communities if you don't have Chinese friends

99.9% of trackers do not offer any real incentives for donating, though, and the ones that do are rarely worth being a member of, so I would avoid the majority that mention anything like that like the plague, though.

If any weebs out there end up on U2, jpopsuki, animebytes, etc., I have such an absurd amount of bonus points, so feel free to PM or емаil me and I'll send you a load of credits to get started without worrying about ratios - plznospam |AT| omarassadi.com