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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?
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.
My work here is dung.
No one really cares what the site looks like when they're trying to grab their 0-day moviez.
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.
Meta will eat itself
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?
Are the ones with the best warez, pr0n and movies. Who gives a crap about looks?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
There are lots (quasi-)private trackers, which not only have as many torrents listed as the sites mentioned in the article, but also provide a lot more quality (in download speed) because of the involved ratio system (demon**** is a good example of this). And there are some very hot 0-day trackers which, even though they only track torrents for 1000 hours, are very popular among many people (such as the file* sites).
:)
Bittorrent-users aren't considered 1337 in general, but they can be 1337er than the ones who use the sites in this article
Meta will eat itself
The downside to semi-private torrent sites is that users try to beat each other at seeding instead of seeding simply to make live easier for others. They'll download small files and seed them for ages, or try to download a torrent from multiple sources and networks in order to be the first in line to seed. The ratio scores that many of these sites implement make it actually hard to get a higher ratio for your average user, because of the saturation of seeders.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
It's one of those things you just get used to doing, and it's hard to move on to something else.
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.
-- You must be yay-high to rule the world.
Iam surprised they didnt write about the Big daddy torrent tracker site Demonoid.com
Wincopy
The only thing a torrent site really needs is a user comment section. If the quality is bad you'll read about it before you download like 1.4G of data and waste your time.
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).
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
And as to whether this review is a boon to the *AA, I think not. They are not lacking for targets of their lawsuits, they are lacking for time, money, and resources to pursue the myriad of potential infringers that are easily identified.
So I really don't see how posting a review of torrent sites changes anything.
You can write very beautiful code and yet have an interface as ugly as sin... likewise, you can have horrible spaghetti code lying behind a very pretty GUI.
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.
The beauty of the BT protocol is that greater popularity means faster downloads, due to more simultaneous sources of content. So I'd expect there to eventually result just the biggest BT network, attracting everyone from slower, smaller networks. Like eBay, or any other increasingly "perfect capital market".
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?
--
make install -not war
Meanwhile, why isn't demonoid in this list? I can almost always find what I want there...
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