Some private trackers are shady. Even if you seed, they might undercount your contribution and ask for money. If that happens, it’s a scam, just walk away.

Public trackers’ public nature means they’re more likely to result in your activity being seen / tracked by entities you don’t want it tracked by, for one. Ever gotten one of those letters from your ISP warning you not to download pirated shit? My understanding is that that’s usually the result of using an insecure tracker.

Content you may not be able to find elsewhere (for example, MySpleen has tons of old discontinued/out of print content), as well as you aren’t going to find copyright holders in private tracker swarms monitoring for IP’s to have infringement notices sent to.

Downside: If you don’t like seeding, you get to fuck yourself and get used to liking seeding or you lose your account.

Only benefits for me are that they have faster download speeds and that I don’t need a VPN.

For me:

• Lifetime of torrents, honestly I rarely have dead torrents on private trackers. Also, most of them send an alert to previous seeders telling them one torrent needs some seeds. So for that it’s WAY better than public.
• Niche contents, I’m into rare movies and some movies are only available on private trackers (unfortunately), so yeah, for me no choice. Though I really miss VXT releases on RARBG :(.

Except that… Not much. I think I still would keep my seedbox if I was on public trackers. Private or public, we all have to do our jobs and participate in seeding what we got :)

A private tracker is a torrent website that provides the same functionality as a public tracker but is invite-only. This means you need to be a member to view the contents of the site and download its torrents. A tracker can either be semiprivate, where you can create an account for free by just registering your details, or fully private, where another user has to invite you. Within a tracker, there is usually an extensive set of rules covering how much one can download, what kind of content one can upload, what precautions one must take when logging into the site, etc. Such rules and content vary from tracker to tracker, and go from rather liberal with little enforcement to ultra-paranoid and autistic. Advantages of private trackers include:

• Speed: If you’re familiar with torrents, you probably know that the bigger the swarm, the faster you download. Private trackers encourage their members to seed torrents for as long as possible, thus increasing the chances of a torrent having a healthy swarm for longer. Not only that, but many members use seedboxes, which are just servers based in data centers, offering very high speeds and excellent peering. Enough to max out anyone’s home connection.
• Retention: Similarly, private trackers usually enforce rules that encourage long-term seeding. A few peers on private trackers will seed many torrents for obscure content that you wouldn’t normally find any peers for on ThePirateBay or KAT.
• Selection: Some content simply isn’t available on any public site and will only be found on private trackers. Sometimes you can’t even legally buy it at all, ironically. Some trackers specialize in obscure or rare content, ensuring that it doesn’t get lost from the Internet.
• Quality control: A major asset of private trackers, albeit one that can vary a lot across trackers. Good private trackers have stringent rules on the content format, quality, and organization. Music trackers will ensure you don’t get horrible 92kbps transcodes; movie trackers will ensure you only get good encodes, ebook trackers will ensure you get retail quality, etc. Members and staff review and approve each torrent. Trumping rules and the removal of duplicates ensure you only get one, community-approved source for the specific content and format. This, coupled with a decent site layout, makes private trackers much more orderly than public ones.
• Security: There are two reasons private trackers are more secure, albeit they may not apply in the future. The first one is that most of them are obscure enough that no one really knows or cares about them (security through obscurity). The second one is that copyright trolls would rather focus on huge public sites that are easy to fish for peers rather than small communities that are hard to join. From a monetary point of view, it’s more worthwhile to stop 10,000 casuals from downloading two torrents than to stop two neckbeards from downloading 10,000 torrents. There are some caveats to this though, copyright trolls will aggressively pursue the source of leaked pre-release media, such as screeners. As a result, many private trackers do not allow this content. Fortunately, leaked screeners are generally very popular and will be easily found on public trackers anyway. Large prolific piracy groups such as scene or well-known release groups are huge targets for copyright enforcement.

Continue to read this wiki if you want to learn more.

The main benefits of private trackers are:

• Download speed. Many users of these trackers will use seedboxes to build ratio. This generally results in a faster download speed for peers.

• Security. Many (but not all) private trackers have strict entry barriers, such as invite only or application based signups. This keeps copyright trolls out of their swarms, which eliminates the need for a vpn or other method of masking your identity. Depending on where you live this can range from a nicety to a necessity.

• Longevity. Torrents generally live longer on private trackers.

• Community. Some private trackers have a forum or IRC channel where you can interact with other community members.

• Availability. Many private trackers will have a wider range of releases of a single media.

• Quality. You will generally find higer quality releases on private trackers. That’s not to say that high quality releases don’t make it to public trackers, some do and some don’t.

• Faster releases. Releases will typically come to private trackers first. Many torrents originate on these trackers or come from scene groups and trickle down.

If you’re finding everything you want on public trackers then you probably aren’t missing anything. You could test the waters on TL or something next time they open.