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Tit-for-tat kicks in. It's fine for smaller files to just jump peers with zero upload, but i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.

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> i reckon Meta would have found it challenging to download very large files without sharing. It's certainly much faster if you don't get throttled or banned by many peers.

You're not that likely to get throttled by seeds though, and most torrents that are downloadable at all have a few seeds. Seeds have no way of verifying whether you're contributing the network, they're just there because someone (implicitly) decided to make the file available to whomever drops by and asks for it.

Would you say that generally books would be considered a small file or a BIG file?

they'd most certainly go for very large curated collections like those of Anna's Archives, we're talking about 10s or 100s of TBs per archive

going 1 by 1 would be quite the exercise in itself considering just how much variety of formats, styles, crap added in the files, random password crapware, etc etc you find for anything other than the most trendy stuff

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