[readicculus]

Bram Cohen designed BT for (among other things) helping offset BW costs (corps, individuals, orgs).

Grabbing a torrent of a linux distro or something from the distro's homepage is quite a bit different than a community like we have here. The more that we all share the more stuff the seeders will put out there, the more we share the less we have to worry about reseeds, or a torrent dying on us mid-download. It's in our own interest to share as much as we possibly can. We aren't concerned with simply allowing a big swarm to grab a seed and then for the last 7 people to bail because most everyone's got it or there aren't any leeches. We only have one real distribution method, and it's best to keep it as close to 1:1 as we can, we want people to grab the stuff, so it's best to give back as much as you get, simply to keep the flow of torrents strong enough for ourselves to grab whatever we need.

If you do go 1:1 (or as close as humanly possible) on everything then torrents will still be alive for those that show up for them late, no need to reseed. Obviously torrents do not "need" to stay open forever, but if everyone actually tried to get to 1:1 they would live quite a bit longer, which is a good thing. Instead the last few people on a torrent just decide to bail, often with people just being the last leech and not sharing anything. If they actually get to 1:1 then someone can easily grab a seed whenever they stumble across the show and the speeds will be better for everyone... just hopping off after only sharing about half of what you downloaded really negatively impacts the spread of the seed.

And if you endorse the view that ">.70" is good enough", then people will eventually just start dropping off before .70, 1:1 makes sense, logically and as a guideline for people so they don't think dropping off whenever they've shared "a good amount" is fine.

And it's not like you have to stop seeding something just because you are starting up another download, just use a decent client like Azureus, or Bit Tornado and change the upload rates on your torrents. If you're worried about not uploading enough on the new download then just wait a few hours for it to get kicking or turn your other seeds down to 3 or something and just leave them be.

I really don't see why it's necessary to ever shut down before you get very close to 1:1, unless you've got to burn and make space, or no leeches show up for like a week I think leaving open your seeds till you're pretty much at 1:1 is an obligation.