That site looks amazing. Do you find that it is more valuable for you than other sites which have more members and perhaps do more? Obviously you find it valuable enough to talk about (and know a lot about).

Both outstanding comments and points. At the risk of pissing my wife off and at the same time not giving a deserving lengthy response, I’ll just say I see your point. I am certainly not arguing that such limitations would help creativity and a broad set of ideas. In fact, just the opposite.

My argument is simply that when the use cases of such mediums are wide open, the noise becomes greater than the signal. There’s much more that you’re not concerned with. If the purpose of the medium is narrower and yet extremely focused, then we simply use the services which feed us the greatest value (largest signal and least noise). Nobody is saying that you couldn’t have more than one service you subscribe to to gain value in different areas (and thereby getting the art and creativity of ideas that inspire improvement and new creations).

Think mp3s – DRM limits what you can do, yes regular old mp3s are more popular, more successful. Then take it to the next step. When you split a song into individual tracks (think Nine Inch Nails distributing Garageband files, or radiohead selling indivudal drum, bass, vocal, and guitar tracks on itunes) – the popularity soars, and more interesting popular music is made.

Think the walled garden newspaper articles – Pay to read. Spread information/thought/ideas, vs limiting the spread. The more people talking about and creating new thoughts about the original, the greater chance of an even better thought, even better idea regarding the same.

just one example:

Ratio and the dynamics thereof are what enable torrenting to be considered in economic terms whatsoever. After all, economics is concerned only with scarce things: you can theoretically download an unlimited amount of data, and the only limitations on that are practical ones like storage and bandwidth. But ratio makes torrenting an activity predicated on scarcity of resources, and therefore, supply and demand do apply. Demand can be affected by anything from musical taste to rarity; and for supply, probably more practical issues, like available bandwidth, but ultimately, incentive to supply (seed) more.

If we had to think in terms of currency, it would be bandwidth, which can be either spent on downloading, or invested through uploading giving a full return. Consider when somebody downloads a torrent from a single seeder: they increase the amount they’ve downloaded, but increase the amount uploaded from that seeder. The cost to the leecher would be the amount they’ve downloaded, but coupled with an opportunity cost: They could’ve used this bandwidth to upload to other users, which would’ve actually increased his ratio the same amount it decreased it.

Fray, I think you have to acknowledge that this is a totally different system compared to what we’re familiar with in modern capitalist society. Torrenting, here, is actually totally egalitarian, and a zero-sum game (we must give what we take, unless we want to change our ratio). People who take too much and give too little are punished, but people who give too much are the ones with high ratio, and certainly by no means a bad thing.

In fact, it’s worth noting that supply by far outstrips demand when we’ve got high speed connections capable of seeding faster than people actually need. The median music collection seems to be about 12,000 songs from what I’ve seen, and really, we could get more than that, but how quickly could we listen to it? For our intents and purposes and also because of the nature of the system (which definitely discourages unnecessarily large amounts of downloading), rapid growth in bandwidth used is unlikely.

Ultimately, in order for these sites to work as they have, a huge amount of seeders vs. a small amount of leechers is pretty much necessary. People with huge ratios make the what/waffles world go around, and it’s partly thanks to the ease of which they can get a large ratio: maybe they’re already audiophiles with extensive collections, maybe it’s because they’ve got a fat fios line and leave a seedbox running. For economics students, think of agriculture: technology has put supply far ahead of demand, and it’s mostly thanks to necessity that it continues to be done, since prices have indeed collapsed. But here, on private trackers, there really isn’t a necessity: we owe it to the goodness of the seeders who actually can upload hundreds of gigabytes. Be kind to them, since they’re not ruthless capitalists, they’re the music world’s greatest philanthropists.