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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?
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.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
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
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.
My work here is dung.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
I was surprised to find that legaltorrents.com is not even mentioned. Are they such a bit player? Is there a bigger, better site in that space (i.e. free/openn/cc culture)?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.