[Review] The Pirate Society

[sashiagustina]

Site is up again after being down for unknown times

[H265]

Don't waste your time with this shit forum. If they find out you're a trader or a cheat you will lose all your accounts. It's not worth it. This forum is trash.

[anon]

Is there even a reason to join now that FTN doesn't exist anymore?

Back in the day there were many of these "community-driven", no trading, no selling invite forums. They were good for obtaining invites (duh) and catching up with new events in the torrent world, but recruitment threads and Reddit have taken over that. Don't waste your time.

[sashiagustina]

Don't waste your time with this shit forum. If they find out you're a trader or a cheat you will lose all your accounts. It's not worth it. This forum is trash.

and it is a dead zone. i just want to copy their "invite tree" table hahahaha

[5thDimension]

image

What happened after 2012 anyway? End of the world?
Is that because the numbers of Broadband Internet users exploded globally and they wanted their chairs in the table?
I think, even the secret societies tend to increase the numbers of its members around the world. But the PT world wants to be small as they possible. I couldn't understand its logic.

[anon]

What happened after 2012 anyway?

The most attractive official recruitment threads closed, citing the large proportion of bad apples they attracted. Most of the rest was already "no movement", meaning regular users are not allowed to offer or request them. This left discussions as the only good reason to participate, so as older members moved on (this stuff can get boring once you've been into it for a few years), not enough new ones came in to fill the void (nobody wants to join an invite forum where 90% of sites are off the table no matter how you sell it). Chatter is mostly on /r/trackers now, where requests, offers or trades are strictly disallowed, and /r/invites plays by the same rules as above.

Two other thoughts.

• All of this allowed sellers to flourish: supply dropped, while demand remained the same. Just search for "torrent invites" on Google and check out the top results.
• If you're over 30, you may remember MP3.com and how artists and bands uploaded their music there for free to promote themselves, yet suddenly became vocal critics of piracy once they got big and managed to sign record deals. Private trackers did the exact same thing with so-called unauthorized giveaways.

the PT world wants to be small as they possible. I couldn't understand its logic.

That's not very accurate. Some private trackers want to maintain their current size because they're happy the way they are. This does not equate to the entire torrent world trying to become smaller. Many are harder to join than in the past, but none are purging their userbases beyond disabling inactive accounts.

The ladder game is bullshit, but at the end of the day, their site = their rules. Just because they exist, doesn't mean we're entitled to an account.

[5thDimension]

Thanks for the clarification, anon.

Just because they exist, doesn't mean we're entitled to an account.

You're right about that, after all.

[anonforlife]

TPS is dead place.

[anon]

https://www.sb-innovation.de/showthread.php?t=35130

TPS was one of many invite forums that experienced a huge surge of activity on mid-2009. Unfortunately and no matter how they wanted to paint it, building a community around the idea of obtaining invites to other sites creates perverse incentives, which ultimately became self-evident and made tracker staff flip from recruiting there themselves to banning participants on sight, a move started and spearheaded by What.cd. It is also the reason why even during the glory days, most members would vanish after successfully requesting FTN, and presumably seeing what a disappointing waste of effort it was.

Dramas, cliques, anti-traders and witch hunts, invite forums that were themselves invite-only... it was a lot of fun. One thing I believe was objectively better back then is that trackers hadn't yet become fastidious about "security" nor finished amassing the user bases and torrent catalogs that make them sought-after now, so joining most of them was easier. Also, the amount of movie and TV sites was greater than 1.