I keep seeing in forums and sites like these that say it’s frowned upon to not seed torrents that you use/used. I saw a post on here or Reddit (I don’t remember) with a guy ecstatic that someone started seeding his download he had been trying to get done for months. I know seeding lets someone download something using your computer but how is it helpful if someone doesn’t have a site and/or isn’t “in-range” ?
If you can’t tell, I don’t know much about how torrenting works other than how to download something using one. I hope that you all can just explain or point me in the right direction because I would like to support the community.
Torrents are P2P. You are downloading from other people who are seeding. If no one seeds, there’s nothing to download. Simple as that. Etiquette dictates you should seed more than you download to ensure the network stays lively.
So even if no one directly connects to my computer, just letting it seed is all you need? I use Deluge and, when it finishes downloading, it says “seeding” but I worry that means that someone can connect to my computer directly. Does it work fine if I just leave it be?
I worry that means that someone can connect to my computer directly.
That’s how torrents work. Everytime you’re downloading so.ething you’re connecting to other people’s computers and letting other people connect to yours.
They don’t connect to your computer like you’re thinking. There is a connection, yes, just like when you’re downloading you connect to other people’s computers. You can see them in the peer list.
Person 1 has file A, which person 2 wants to download. Person 2 connects to person 1 and starts to download which makes person 1 a seeder. If person 1 has file A but doesn’t seed, person 2 can’t download file A since there is no seeder.
When you seed you make sure that others can download that same file, but yes, they establish a connection with you to download it. If I have understood it correctly.
Bittorrent is a file sharing protocol, which isn’t inherently dangerous. The ‘torrent’ contains the information that’s being passed around to allow connectivity to that particular file. This is also not inherently dangerous as that information is very specific and limited… and doesn’t allow any other user to browse the rest of your computer.
What may be dangerous is downloading a file that contains malware or viruses via a torrent. Use reputable sites and keep your security software up to date. Better yet, use a different computer for this activity with a vpn.
If you have slower internet or don’t seed 24/7, I would recommend just focusing on seediing torrents with a low number of seeders. It doesn’t really matter if you leech the latest episode of a popular new TV series, as there will be so many other seeders, (many with a better capacity to seed). However, for something older or more niche your decision to seed or leech could determine whether someone else gets to enjoy that content.
You’re not wrong, but it bugs me when my ratio drops, so I always seed everything I download. I have a pretty good internet service though.
My stats:
I do exactly this, most of my seeds are either books or extremely esoteric films and TV.
Speaking of which… anyone know where I can find the show “Kid Nation”?
With a traditional download, examplesite.com sends a file to your computer, that’s it.
With torrents, instead of that you download little pieces of the file from many different computers. Sometimes hundreds of different computers. Then once you’ve downloaded the file you can then start sharing pieces to other people downloading. The more people doing this, the faster the downloads will be for everyone else and the less strain it will put on each computer’s Internet connection.
Also if not many people are seeding, there’s a danger that the file will have 0 seeders and nobody can download it at all.
This is also why torrenting is good for privacy. Shutting down one website isn’t so hard. Shutting down hundreds of random personally owned computers is very hard.
When you download a torrent, you’re downloading it from someone else’s computer. That ‘someone else’ is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.
When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It’s a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.
If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.
Hey everyone! I saw the comments and they were all very helpful. I just had no idea how torrents worked lol. I will be sure to do my part and I hope anyone with similar curiosity can also benefit from this post! Feel free to say your piece but note that I get the gist of it now.
