Ten Most Used BitTorrent Sites Compared

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?

The best Torrent sites are private...

[packeteer]

Honestly the best torrent sites are the semi-private ones. There are quite a few non-public bit torrent sites that are very easy to get into but are not directly available to anyone who goes to their web page.

I find that public BT sites are too slow becuase nobody cares to share much.

Re:From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read th

[eldavojohn]

There's something the technicians need to learn from the artists. If it isn't aesthetically pleasing, it's probably wrong.

How hilariously coincidental. And although it may be the quote of the moment, I must counter with something I've said to many people: Stephen Hawking isn't very aesthetically pleasing but he's rarely wrong.

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.

TFA's conclusion:

[kripkenstein]

... btjunkie.org

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.

MPAA and RIIA

[minus_273]

How much you wanna bet the MPAA and RIIA are also reading this article. Thanks guys. Not only do you independently show which sites engage in copyright enfringement but also how much each site does that (on a daily basis no less)

Re:From the quote at the bottom of /. as I read th

[Ed Avis]

Stephen Hawking isn't very aesthetically pleasing but he's rarely wrong.

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 sure it passes the tests.

Your analogy of insects is interesting: it does appear that bugs which are ugly or make us instinctively go 'yuck' are also those we'd want to avoid because they are parasites or spread diseases. A picture of a tick or flea evokes feelings of ugliness at some instinctual level.

Re:TFA's conclusion:

[The Blow Leprechaun]

I've been using btjunkie regularly for about a year now. It is pretty good because it has so much, but it's slow as hell and you lose all seeders frequently because, as someone previously mentioned, public bittorrent sites kind of suck.

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 a related note, I was under the impression that the Pirate Bay had been taken down and was now being closely monitored and downloading from them was essentially flagging yourself.

Comparison Criteria

[Graywolf]

The sites are compared by number of torrents, new torrents per day and "site features". This does not reflect a site's usability at all! What is importent is the average seeder/leecher quota and the availability + quality of "fresh" material. Those are obviously much harder to measure.

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.

A GUI revolution has taken place.

[Anonymous Coward]

Over the past few years, a GUI revolution has taken place, and it hasn't necessarily been beneficial. Surprisingly, it arose from what was once NeXTSTEP, which was often considered the most sane GUI out there. Mac OS X brought us a bubbly, colourful GUI with lots of shading. It was attractive to many people, but serious computer users who use their Macs for publishing, development, etc., found it to be wasteful. The large bubbly buttons took up more screen real estate than simple rectangles. The shading often added confusion, and removed clarity.

Many have begun to think that a similar paradigm should be applied to web sites. This has particularly been the case in the Web 2.0 area, where large images of buttons take up three or four times the screen space that a more traditional linked image or text link would have consumed. Many people have become mislead into thinking that if a GUI isn't colourful and doesn't have large gaps between components and data, then it's a "poor" GUI.

This revolution in GUI design moved on to Microsoft, a few years late, of course. The default theme of Windows Vista has attempted to copy the GUI of Mac OS X in many respects, and thus has copied many of the same problems. The taskbar is an excellent example. It has this white shading along the top that adds no functional benefit, and actually makes the taskbar more distracting and difficult to interpret quickly.

With the latest release of iTunes 7, we actually are seeing Apple backtrack to where they were in the past. There are hints that the bubbly GUI will be a way of the past. I know there are many professionals using Apple systems that would be very pleased for a simple, NeXTSTEP-like interface that allows them to focus on getting their work done. We realize that bubbly GUIs and flashy shading don't help us get work done, and so we'd rather see them gone. It will be intriguing to see who prevails: those who advocate flashy, distracting GUIs, or those who want clean, crisp interfaces that promote usability.

Re:TFA's conclusion:

[in2mind]

I too have a feeling that the whole article is a whitewash written by BTjunkie.org itself. BTJunkie.org homepage links to that blog article. (which amusingly is featured in slashdot frontpage..Hmm)

And their stats seems to be HIGHLY INFLATED.

Todays Torrents:i,396
Total Torrents: 960,654
Total Trackers: 10,085
Total Seeders: 10.99mil
Total Leechers: 16.57mil

Excuse me.11 Million seeders?

Compare that with the stats of wellknown sites like Mininova...

Total torrents in database 148,079
Total torrent downloads: 642,943,292
Total seeds: 1,704,142
Total leechers: 2,511,095
Total number of trackers: 1,492
Total searches today 333,557

isoHunt / Mininova

[ColinPL]

In my opinion the best site for new releases is isoHunt [isohunt.com]. There are no fake files on isoHunt and isoHunt torrents usually have many reliable trackers cross-referenced from BitTorrent sites across the internet.

For older files Mininova [mininova.org] is the best. It has almost 150000 files. Everyone can upload, but there are good moderators who remove fake files. The site has a very fast, CSS-based layout without HTML tables.

I don't use private sites, because it's very hard to have a high ratio on those sites if you don't download 0-day releases. On public sites I have a 1.0-1.1 ratio after 3 hours of seeding. It's impossible on private sites because there are 8 times more seeders than leechers.

Ten most used bittorrent

[shiyun074238]

Ten most used bittorrent
BTJunkie
BitTorrent.com
Bushtorrent & Torrentreactor
isoHunt
Meganova
Mininova
The Pirate Bay
Torrent Portal
TorrentSpy
Torrentz

popular?

[Rulke]

I could be dead wrong here, but isn't popularity rated as in 'people that use it'? giving us raw numbers like what it looks like, how many torrents are hosted and how many more it can sponge of the web isn't telling me that... it just tells me how big they are.. relativly speaking He tells us why it could be popular, not if it is, he fails the headline..

Re:The original BT.com

[Have Blue]

Apparently he thinks that BT was created in order for him to get warez and movies faster, and that "the creator" is somehow failing in his responsibilities by not facilitating this. Which is silly as the creator has always maintained that he developed BT as just a transport mechanism and tried to distance himself from "the scene" whenever given the chance.