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Ten Most Used BitTorrent Sites Compared
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Sep 25, 2006 07:28 AM
from the they-have-legitimate-purposes-as-well dept.
from the they-have-legitimate-purposes-as-well dept.
An anonymous reader writes that "This study was just released that compares the ten most popular BitTorrent sites. A great read if you are torn between what site to use, it has benchmark graphs and anaylsis. I was rather suprised with the findings." I hadn't heard of several of the top sites they rate. But why is it that so many torrent sites are so ugly?
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Ugly? In What Way? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never taken a UI design course. And I'm probably the last person on earth to be able to make one. I'm an engineer developer and my web services often have no front end. If they do, it is one of ice cold ability to do what you want -- the perfect marriage of function and function.
So what about these sites displeases you? I just flipped through four of them and none of them made my eyes puke like an angry fruit salad (although BushTorrent did cause me to cringe at the site of my 'fearless leader')
Hell, I even visited Torrentz and, although the 90s called and asked for their 'z' back, the design was still pleasing to me. I went to isoHunt that was minimalist but still did the job. I went to MegaNova and even though it was busy as hell, it had the top torrents laid out by category. So what's the problem? There are a few flaws here and there but these sites serve the function they are there to perform. The only really ugly things on these sites are the ads. So far I've seen one flashing ad and one shaking ad. Those are offensive to my eye but I'm so use to ignoring them! I mean, the people who run these indexing sites probably don't get revenue from anything but ads so to make their pages load faster, they inundate us with banners and Ads By Google. So what? So does Slashdot and I'm here quite often. It's the 00s, most sites would put ads by Google on their own grandmother if she was digital.
I don't see any problems with these UIs. They're not award winning, but then again, should they be? I mean, the few times I've used bittorrent is because a site wants to host a large file illegally (like a WoW patch or whatever) and they instead offer a torrent file. I'm really interested in what everyone else is interested in and, if you are, then just go to these sites and peruse them. Don't make them your homepage.
If you really think they're that horrible, wander back to Geocities user pages and enjoy dancing Jesus and Flying Toasters with the blink marquee tag abused to high hell. Then you'd be overjoyed to see some of the gradient blends used on these pages.
From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read this: (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read th (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, conventionally cited as "you can't judge a book by its cover."
What it means is that I've seen some very ugly things create or provide very beautiful things. Elliott Smith was ugly but his music was beautiful. Although the library I went to as a kid was ugly and looked like an old bomb shelter, it provided something very important to me. Although snakes and earth worms and spiders look ugly as hell, I still love what they do. And, as a kid, it made sense to me to kill rabbits and pocket gophers on a farm while making sure not to harm a garden snake as I mowed the lawn.
Like I'll still maintain, whether something is beautiful or ugly tells me nothing.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought one of the main tests scientists use when evaluating a new theory is whether it 'looks right' or its 'beauty' (which could be another way of saying simplicity). And in mathematics, conjectures are often judged by how pretty the equation seems - to decide which ones are likely to be right, and worth trying to make a proof for. Certainly in programming the aesthetic quality of a program is the most important thing after making
Re:From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read th (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, isn't it good design to keep the interface of your program slightly ugly, whilst maintaining a logical and flowing design, as to avoid distracting the user from what they're trying to do? Flowers and curves and ponies are all well and good, but they don't necessarily make for an easy to use interface.
Parent
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However, you're talking apples & oranges here, although you've raised an interesting point. What wer're talking about is the act of creation, whereas you're talking about the creator (I use "creation" here loosely).
The idea as I understand it is that a well-trained scientist/engineer/mathematician/whatever has a good sense of what works well and what doesn't. He develops a sort of "instinct" for what is a successful and elegant implementation, and w
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You're missing the point. Nobody ever said the physical appearance of a person has anything to do with their talents, but the quote is valid in a number of other contexts. For example, the theory of relativity gained a lot of traction before solid experimental evidence appeared because physicists found it elegant. And to get back to what started this thread, in UI design, attractiveness and functionality are often much the same. A messy, cluttered interface is both ugly and hard to use. Meanwhile, an i
A GUI revolution has taken place. (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks (Score:5, Funny)
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Function not form. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another function (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
The original BT.com (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, but why the quotation marks? Is that meant to be a dig at Brah's "supposed" claim to have created it? Be fair, the guy created something that revolutionised the internet as a medium for media. I don't think he deserves that kind of attitude for not doing as great a job at implementing the service as he did with the software.
Re:The original BT.com (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Which of these (Score:4, Insightful)
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Which of these top 10 sites focus on non-copyrighted material? You know, the stuff that the torrent fans bring up as the reason they use bittorrent?
Since current law makes just about everything copyright by default I'm afraid you are going to have a hard time finding any site that does not have potentially infringing material. The thing that really bites though is that it is almost impossible to determine whether a particular file is being distributed against the creator's wishes until it is downloaded and
Re:Which of these (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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There's always Legaltorrents.com, started by Simon Carless!
I've been to that site but its index page is extermely slim particularly considering that 99.9% of human creations are in the public domain or under freely redistrubutable licenses, not to mention it lacks a search feature.
The best Torrent sites are private... (Score:5, Interesting)
I find that public BT sites are too slow becuase nobody cares to share much.
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Re:The best Torrent sites are private... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
10 most popular (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you can't complain about the content, bellyaching about the site's aesthetics is the way to go.
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Who gives a crap about looks?
It's a bit like a bank thief complaining about mismatched furniture inside a bank.
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Speaking of which, I thought P2P was used primarily for legal downloads and that's why The Man was so eager to shut it down before Creative Commons drum'n'bass loops cut into the sales of, errr, "Meat Loaf - Bat Out of Hell III - The Monster
Public trackers suck (Score:3, Insightful)
Bittorrent-users aren't considered 1337 in general, but they can be 1337er than the ones who use the sites in this article
TFA's conclusion: (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I'm not sure I can trust anything this 'review' says. For example, by the numbers btjunkie.org seems incredibly more successful than any of its competition, which seems a bit odd given that it doesn't seem that well-known (53,000 hits on Google; compare to mininova, which has 3,000,000). TFA says:
"At first I thought BTJunkie's numbers must be fake, but I assure you it is real! I tested the number posted with the number in the actual directory for the day and they matched for a week straight!"
Yes, I am sure that you did, and I am also sure that you don't own btjunkie.org. 100% sure.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the more important elements of a good bittorrent site is a responsive community so that you can request things and actually expect them to be upped. Nothing like being able to get a VHS rip of Howard the Duck or War Games, older stuff that it's harder to find.
On
Re:TFA's conclusion: (Score:4, Informative)
Nope, the whole raid was apparently illegal and was done only because the white house pressured the Swedish government to do it, they might even end up getting paid restitution from their government (maybe that part's wishful thinking).
Also, here is a tracert of thepiratebay.org, it would be pretty devious of the MPAA to use this domain name (apb [wikipedia.org] is a swedish copyright lobby organisation):
:)
Parent
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And their stats seems to be HIGHLY INFLATED.
Excuse me.11 Million seeders?
Compare that with the stats of wellknown sites like Mininova...
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MPAA and RIIA (Score:3, Interesting)
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I personally still like The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually started using Torrentz a while ago, but I couldn't get used to it's interface.
It's like when AltaVista was THE search engine and then came along Google. It took me some time until I really abandoned AltaVista.
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Demonoid (Score:2, Insightful)
Comparison Criteria (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, BTJunkie is "Editor's Choice" because it lists the most torrents, including "private" ones they find using a Google-likc web crawler. This means lots of available content, but can you guess how much junk/old/inactive torrents you will find there? I think you have to test the sites yourself to find what suits your requirements best. Still, good list of the "bigger" torrent sites there.
"So many torrents sites are so ugly!" (Score:2, Funny)
"Not only are you a thief for downloading music and movies, downloading makes you gay!"
user comments (Score:3, Insightful)
I think all these sites are pretty good in their way and to mark them down as 'ugly' doesn't make much sense.
If someone made one using Flash would it be any better? The answer is no (and I develop flash sites too).
bt junkie . . . (Score:2)
Succeeding Like Success (Score:3, Insightful)
And I'd expect the content available to eventually "diffuse" across these networks, equalizing in availability on all of them, especially the largest.
But BT is now several years old, with many global users, and there are still lots of little networks and very different content available. What's working against those basic borg trends?
Ten most used bittorrent (Score:2, Interesting)
BTJunkie
BitTorrent.com
Bushtorrent & Torrentreactor
isoHunt
Meganova
Mininova
The Pirate Bay
Torrent Portal
TorrentSpy
Torrentz
Too bad most of those arn't torrent sites. (Score:3, Informative)
It's like calling Google Froogle (love the name) a store. It's not a store, it's a search engine FOR stores.
I love Torrentspy, but with out sites like the pirate bay Torrentspy would be dead, same thing for ISO hunt and many of the rest. The pirate bay is the only site on there that I know that is an actual Torrent site that hosts torrents. The rest that I know of just hosts links to torrents hosted on different servers. It's a completely different system and as such it shouldn't be compared.
Hell a posting like this is exactly what the anti-torrent community was looking for, now they can nail the top 10 torrent sites in a row (except pirate bay, I'm still doubting they will be able to take that down.)
I'm developer of isoHunt.com, study is flawed (Score:3, Informative)
1) Your reliance on claimed index size is flawed. BTJunkie's size claim looks to be non-unique torrents. To put it in perspective, isoHunt's non-unique master index is 1.7+ million torrents, while the searcheable index is the 300k+ count published (active and unique torrents).
2) A better methodology on review search engines is to sample search results, and rank by the relevance and scope of the results. You will see the search results counts to be more inline than the claimed index sizes you used for your review.
3) FYI, isoHunt indexes 7/9 other sites you reviewed, including BTJunkie.
4) It would be nice to be more specific in how you rated site features. Also, speed and relevance of search should be important factors for ranking all the sites.
5) Shameless plug: if you are talking about site features, an important one you've missed is cross-referenced trackers in all our indexed torrents. So each torrent we index is augmented by multiple trackers that would be tracking it, so you get the maximum number of peers in your torrent download. No site in your review has this ability, other than Torrentz.com (but they don't cache the torrents so you don't get any benefit for the actual download, as you get the original torrents from original sites).
Cheers,
IH
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
6) BTJunkie's "mail new torrents" feature is hardly unique. isoHunt has RSS feeds for every search result and category. RSS is also available from most of the other sites, although maybe not for every search result.
7) Torrentz.com's "search for files within torrents" is not unique either. isoHunt always searches within torrents. You should notice it from highlighted filenames in the torrents' details.