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Comment by BoingBoomTschak | Hacker News Reader

Protip: Orpheus exists for those who don't want to bother with Red's antiquated system that forces people to "play the game/economy" instead of just downloading what you want, uploading a little and seeding ad vitam eternam.

The only downside is that it's missing some stuff (which you can find elsewhere, usually) but you can be part of the solution.

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> The only downside is that it's missing some stuff

Which is literally the reason why trackers that aim at variety use the "antiquated system". Trackers that don't care about the long tail so much because they aim for popular content and accept that old torrents will get stale / unseeded can easily be ratioless. It's a simple case of "can't have it both ways".

Not really. See AB and its generous system yet very well furnished selection. Orpheus is simply less popular.

I take issues with you calling it "antiquated", when it's just a different approach and both are valid and depend on a lot of factors if they are the right one for the specific community.

I guess you're right. Still, hate the kind of system that forces people to upload random garbage instead of rewarding long term seeding (especially of stuff with no or a single other seed), it's not a healthy relation with music. Mind you, I also find Orpheus too easy.

Still, if there's at least one thing that deserves the "antiquated" qualifier on both Orpheus and (I think?) Red, it's the FLAC-doesn't-trump-MP3 garbage rule that make people litter the sites with crap just to gain ratio.

That rule is always polarizing, but there's many people who don't like to download FLAC as it's too large, or they don't want to keep seeding FLAC forever if they just convert it to V0 or 320 right away anyway. I'd agree that we don't need that many lossy formats though.

As a longtime RED user, I can say I've not done anything other than just download what I want and let it sit for a while, uploading maybe a couple dozen items, and I've never come close to having a problem.

I think you're fighting ghosts that don't exist if you just let stuff seed for a while after downloading, a.k.a. just being a decent tracker member.

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