Indeed, using public trackers works pretty brilliantly if you watch mostly "popular" movies and TV (not necessarily what everyone watches, but things that people are generally aware exist), and avoid anything less than a few months old.
How obscure is the stuff you download? Just last week I got interested in listening to Kaoru Abe, who was a Japanese avant-garde sax player who I'm pretty sure most people never heard of, and I not only found the album, as it downloaded in just a couple of hours. I frankly never felt that public trackers were lacking in that regard.
TPB has nothing from him. You can find some of his albums spread around random public trackers, but it's nothing anywhere close to the convenience and selection available on What.
I think maybe the point of the GP was that using public trackers exposes you to ISP sanctions or even legal ramifications (depending on your jurisdiction) that are less likely on private trackers.
I suppose. This is true for more than just Bittorrent use, though.
If you live in the any country that closely monitors (or has industry-rights organizations that monitor) its citizens' internet activity, then immediately, without fail, go pay the $5/mo or whatever to get a tiny little server somewhere nicer!
You can:
• set your server up as a seedbox
• set up OpenVPN on it (which has been beautifully simplified by Docker-containerization; no need to create and forward an extra bridge interface)
• run an MTA daemon, so you can actually obey the semantics of SMTP (mail is supposed to arrive in your own possession before it's considered "delivered", etc.)
• run an IRC bouncer, or whatever the modern IM-network equivalent of that is (is there one? we've regressed, if not)
• run a web server, e.g. nginx, with (authenticated) WebDAV support enabled, and thus have a place to push arbitrary temporary files when you want to share them by URL
Or, in short, you can fully participate in the Internet.
Disclosure: I'm working on a business in this space. :)
• run an IRC bouncer, or whatever the modern IM-network equivalent of that is (is there one? we've regressed, if not)
The modern equivalent is the IM-network itself. You don't need a bouncer to store messages sent while you were offline or to keep your nickname when the IM servers already do that. If you want to hide your IP, you can just use the VPN.
My tastes are pretty eclectic, and the public sites don't really cover those. I also only have 25/12 comcast to home, and trying to do torrenting on private sites with that is painful. My seed box is an atom with 3tb HDD in colo on gige.
I'm running a fairly automated Torrent+Plex setup without the need for a seedbox or a private torrent site.