Ratio sites, and coping with the consequences of zero-sum
Ratio-based torrent sites are getting pretty common (I regularly use 4 of them now). So all of this is in the context of bittorrent and ratio-sites. I’m planning on this post being a general examination of the structures and mechanics involved in these sites.
The meat is this: since bittorrent is a zero-sum protocol, it’s impossible for every user to have a >1.0 ratio without the system adding trapdoors or in some other way breaking the zero-sum nature of the system. Read on for more details.
– Mechanics of a typical ratio site –
To understand the problem, you first need to understand the mechanics of a ratio site. Consider the site BitMeTV.org. BitMeTV is an invite-only ratio-based community that exclusively tracks TV shows. The content generally includes “scene releases” of TV shows (tv-rips, dvd-rips, etc), as well as bundled releases of individual seasons and whole completed series. It’s pretty popular, with a 25,000 user cap and about 14,000 total torrents.
To be able to invite other users, you have to have “Power User” status, which is awarded based on your ratio, total upload, and membership length — so you can become a power user by having a ratio above 1.05, at least 4 weeks of membership and a total upload over 65GB. “Power User” status also brings with it the privilege of having more active torrents. Another promotion occurs at a 3.0 ratio and 100+GB uploaded, sending the user to “VIP” status and giving them the ability to have even more active torrents.
The net effect is that it’s generally desirable to maintain above a 1.0 ratio, and the higher the better.
– Implications of zero-sum –
Bittorrent is a zero-sum game. Every byte of upload from somewhere counts as download somewhere else. In a public, open environment, this isn’t a big problem, because there’s no particular incentive to continue to seed files or to build your ratio — the only reason to keep your torrents open is that it’s a nice thing to do.
But in a closed, ratio-based community, this becomes a problem. There’s always going to be someone with a much, much better connection than average, and someone with a much worse connection than average. When those users have to compete with each other, the clear “winner” (as far as ratio-building goes) is the guy on the good connection.
Because of the closed community and the incentives to maintain a 1.0+ ratio, people to upload to become a rarefied commodity — a privilege to be competed for, rather than the distasteful side-effect. And competition for that commodity can be fierce.
– Resulting communities –
The result of this is simultaneously a blessing and a curse for the downloader. The environment fostered by that sort of setup is one of competition for upload credit, and that means that most things are going to get force-fed down your throat as fast as you can possibly download them. That’s nice, because it generally saturates your downstream and gets you what you’re trying to get as fast as it’s possible for you to get it.
However, once you’ve got the file, you’ve got to seed to ratio-build back up to that 1.0+, as a matter of habit. If you don’t, you’re not going to maintain your ratio on the long-term, and it’s going to end up screwing you over. But since upload is a rare commodity, unless you’ve got a particularly good connection yourself, you’re going to be competing against everyone else around for a minuscule amount of available seed bandwidth, because everyone else is also trying to seed — why do you think you got that file so fast?
This is where that whole zero-sum game comes into play. See, somewhere in that swarm of people that force-fed you the file as fast as you could download,there’s some guy whose ratio is already 5.0 on that torrent, and he got an extra .1 or .2 off of you by himself. He’s one of the lions, and he gets the lion’s share of the bandwidth. For every added point above 1.0 that you go,you’re denying some other user the ability to make that point, and thus to make 1.0. So if you keep seeding, keep force-feeding people like that, you end up screwing over the people that come after you.
However, there’s practical problems with just stopping at 1.0, too. In the case of BitMeTV, there’s a lot of older series batches that you might want to get, but they’re in the tens of gigabytes range. You’ll never seed those old torrents enough to get your ratio back, so you need to bank ratio with smaller, lighter torrents. At least, if you’re a lion and can successfully do so.
For example, I want to pull down a torrent that’s 50 gigs, so before I start it I’m going to make sure that my upload is about 50 gigs ahead of my download, so I don’t drop out of power user status and lose my invites and privileges. Which, in turn, means I won’t be leeching that torrent for a couple weeks, and I’ll be abusing other people to whatever extent I can to make it happen.
This isn’t exactly good for the community though. In making myself able to comfortably download the files I want, I’m going to be denying dozens of people access to that upload potential.
I’m pretty well established on the sites that I use — to get down to .5 (i.e.:to be in danger of losing the account on BitMe), I’d have to turn off all uploading entirely and download about 175 gigs of data — which is attainable, but I’d have to be trying pretty hard. But for a new user, they need to upload more than 2.5GB by the time they’re done downloading their first 5GB, or they’re in danger. So that 50GB of positive upload I’m planning to bank will potentially deny 20 new users worth of capacity to establish themselves, if they can’t successfully out-compete against me for that upload. And these lions aren’t atypical … there’s dozens of users wandering around capable of swinging a couple tens of megabits at any given torrent… so your 256 kilobit cable modem connection is not really a good contender. In fact, it’s just that sort of user who sticks around and is successful on ratio sites — essentially feeding on a stream of new victims.
– Bandwidth sinks and other coping mechanisms–
There’s a couple ways that different communities accommodate this phenomenon. For example, a site can allow a continuous flow of new users (as old accounts get purged). Or it can offer a “donate for credit” option, allowing users to buy their way out of being out-competed for bandwidth. Another possibility is just to let users keep going with lower ratios — encourage users to have 1.0,and don’t incentivize anything higher than that, while tolerating substantially lower. Then there’s “bandwidth sinks” — files that are free to download but still count for upload.
However it goes though, the only ways that really consistently work involve either tolerating that the nature of the beast is such that some users will be screwed over (i.e.: tolerating substantially lower ratios than 1.0), or creating “bandwidth sinks” (e.g.: purchased bandwidth, “free” downloads) to make upload a little less in-demand. Either way, this breaks the 1.0-mantra of these communities (”1.0 is good, 2.0 is better, less than 1.0 is bad”), and in a way serves as almost a fundamental rejection of the nature of bittorrent itself.
From a user perspective, it makes sense to be ruthless and hog as much upload as you can get your hands on, simply to gain the privileges and because you can. But from a community perspective, maybe it would be better if everyone just started considering a 0.7 ratio to be a good stopping point.