Gazelle, What.cd and the economy by oorza

There's been a hefty bit of discussion about the previously low ratio requirements and overseeding's effect on the economy as well as various other posts in a multitude of threads describing What's economy and particular effects on it. I aim to elaborate on all points and fully extrapolate on the popular metaphorical representation of the tracker's traffic as a simple economy, as best I see and understand it.

The basis for all of this is, of course, the analogy comparing the site to a simple economy. It works as such: in a simple economy, there is no credit, but rather a rudimentary currency system based entirely on person-to-person trading. There are no no loans, no banks or anything of the sort. In our model, the currency would be the amount of ratio buffer you have and the bartering would be the uploading and downloading of torrents. A lot of people have pointed out inaccuracies and fallacies with this model and I don't believe that many of them are accurate and, as such, I will be continuing henceforth to make every point fit into this model and address the issues that I have seen pointed out with the model.

The first and most pressing issue with the model is that there is a constant influx of new torrents, therefore (in the words of the antagonists of this theory) the model is illegitimate, as no economy has a static amount of currency, whereas any tracker with user upload privileges has a forever dynamic amount. Keep in mind that the primary method of measuring your "wealth" is your upload amount, so uploading a torrent increases your wealth while only reappropriating funds from the economy - not removing an equal amount. There are a few problems with this argument. To begin with, it's inaccurate as currency is constantly being removed from the economy in several ways. There are those users who get disabled with a positive ratio whether because of disabling or inactivity. There are inactive users who never download and just seed, therefore removing money from the active economy, effectively removing it altogether. And now there is the new request system that does just that. Less total currency means more time spent seeding, which means more seeders per torrent, which is overall beneficial for the site (I don't know of any legitimate arguments against really well seeded torrents). Some other things that are equated in this model: disabling users for ratio reasons is equivalent to debtors' prison or declaring bankruptcy; uploading a new torrent, printing new money a la the US Fed; torrents being deleted, a collectors' item becoming worthless overnight.

Because every user has the ability to create new "money" in the form of new torrents, it's logical to say that every user has the ability to inflate the economy. Also, users that get banned with a negative ratio (or are "in debt"), so they've put currency they don't have into the hands of someone else. Traditionally, this is seen as negative for an economy, in real world terms, as money is worth less. However, in our somewhat distorted model, inflation can be viewed positively. The primary argument against overseeding is that it is too hard to seed, which isn't a bad thing as it encourages, or even forces, new content to be uploaded, which furthers the site towards the eventual goal of having every music release, ever. The traditional line of thought about overseeding is that it amounts to a few users with fast connections stockpiling the currency and having a huge ratio, therefore allowing them to hit and run most torrents they snatch (as well as making everyone else poor - hence they are forced to seed, a positive in my book). This wouldn't be an issue (and it wasn't at OiNK), except for the amount of people that have the buffer to do it has been so large, because of the older ratio requirements. I don't have official numbers, maybe a staff member who reads this will give them to me, but I'd estimate about 20% of the site are Power Users or would be, save for the 10 uploaded torrents that are now required. So, if only 20% of the userbase is hitting and running it means more seeding to the people who have poorer ratios, which means (generally speaking) more activity, as those without good ratios are more likely to download a lot and seeding more usually equates to making more ratio more quickly. And activity is the entire basis for the economy, as it's the primary way to "make money" in our model. Now that the ratio requirements have been raised, we should be seeing a huge drop in hit and run traffic. So, inflation causes overseeding in our model, which causes new torrents to be uploaded and means users can't hit and run most torrents they snatch, especially lossless torrents. I, personally, don't see any downside to this train of thought.

The new request system has raised quite a bit of clamor in the forums since the launch of Gazelle. It's been accused of discouraging users from requesting, thus meaning less new content. It's been suggested to make bounties voluntary. Removing, or reducing, the tax has been recommended often. Other things have been said, but these are the most commonly echoed sentiments, so I'll only be adressing these. As far as discouraging request, yes, it will discourage request like "Portishead - new album 2028" as they're generally pointless and will get made when a title is released, surely, but those won't clutter the requests page, especially when sorted by votes, which I don't see as a bad thing as all these requests are major bands, whose releases are all but guaranteed to get uploaded anyhow. Rare and obscure requests, I don't believe will occur any less often, as 100MB is hardly a hit to anyone's ratio who has the privileges to make a request. 20MB to vote is a quite negligible amount as well. Making bounties voluntary, as anything in real life that is voluntarily taxed will prove, will effectively make a great majority of requests bountyless, therefore defeating the dual purpose of the bounty system. Not only is it giving further incentive, other than e-Penis, to fill requests, it theoretically will become the primary method of deflating the economy, which means that 20% of users I discussed above will spend more time seeding, which means more seeding, which as I illustrated above, means more activity. The tax of 50% is sane and serves its purpose well: it prevents abuse. Abuse can occur with a taxless system by a friend with a buffer making a request worth a significant amount immediately before someone uploads the requested torrent, guaranteeing an easy way to transfer credit, without measures like repeated downloading of a torrent where he is the only seeder. Removing 50% of the bounty will not prevent this altogether, as any system can and will be and often is abused. However, it discourages such abuse and does damage control on the abuse as well, as removing large amounts of currency, abuse wise or not, is overall beneficial to the site's economy. Especially if the receiving user is on ratio watch - he's probably an overleecher, which means his habits won't change and that money will get sent to a seeding user who deserves it. The way the request system is structured it will, theoretically, fix a lot of problems with the site: underseeding, hit and running, and a large disparity between Power Users and normal Users. This is all, at this point, theoretical, but there is already evidence that more requests are being filled faster than they were before, whether from new uploads or not.

The tracker economy model works, but not always at first glance. Activity in downloading is equatable to trading, ratio buffer is equatable to wealth. Approached from the "force economic issues into a tracker" perspective, the model breaks as it is a very simple, rudimentary model. However, approached from the opposite direction - "force tracker issues into an economical model" - I have yet to find something that doesn't fit within the very basic framework explained here.

If I left anything out, let me know.