What is the benefit to joining private torrents?

For me:

• Lifetime of torrents, honestly I rarely have dead torrents on private trackers. Also, most of them send an alert to previous seeders telling them one torrent needs some seeds. So for that it's WAY better than public.
• Niche contents, I'm into rare movies and some movies are only available on private trackers (unfortunately), so yeah, for me no choice. Though I really miss VXT releases on RARBG :(.

Except that.. Not much. I think I still would keep my seedbox if I was on public trackers. Private or public, we all have to do our jobs and participate in seeding what we got :)

only benefit I gained was a forum board to discuss and also that there were lots of seeders even for very obscure stuff

For me, the principal benefit is content quality. For example, on movies you'll have the best possible release for every resolution, without having to go through every version and finding one that suits you.

• they are properly moderated so no fake torrents or malware (and anyone trying to upload those is immediately banned)
• many have rules about formats, nfo files - another guarantee that your file is what it says it is
• duplicates are not usually allowed - eg if an album already exists in FLAC format, you can’t upload another one
• ratio requirements mean people almost always seed, and many use seed boxes which means speed is much faster. Movies download to my seed box in a couple of seconds typically.

If you are able to get all the content you need from public trackers and you don't worry about copyright agancies tracking you than there's no reason for you at all to bother with private trackers.

The main benefits of private trackers are:

• Download speed. Many users of these trackers will use seedboxes to build ratio. This generally results in a faster download speed for peers.

• Security. Many (but not all) private trackers have strict entry barriers, such as invite only or application based signups. This keeps copyright trolls out of their swarms, which eliminates the need for a vpn or other method of masking your identity. Depending on where you live this can range from a nicety to a necessity.

• Longevity. Torrents generally live longer on private trackers.

• Community. Some private trackers have a forum or IRC channel where you can interact with other community members.

• Availability. Many private trackers will have a wider range of releases of a single media.

• Quality. You will generally find higer quality releases on private trackers. That's not to say that high quality releases don't make it to public trackers, some do and some don't.

• Faster releases. Releases will typically come to private trackers first. Many torrents originate on these trackers or come from scene groups and trickle down.

If you're finding everything you want on public trackers then you probably aren't missing anything. You could test the waters on TL or something next time they open.

Public trackers' public nature means they're more likely to result in your activity being seen / tracked by entities you don't want it tracked by, for one. Ever gotten one of those letters from your ISP warning you not to download pirated shit? My understanding is that that's usually the result of using an insecure tracker.

Only benefits for me are that they have faster download speeds and that I don't need a VPN.

Content you may not be able to find elsewhere (for example, MySpleen has tons of old discontinued/out of print content), as well as you aren't going to find copyright holders in private tracker swarms monitoring for IP's to have infringement notices sent to.

Downside: If you don't like seeding, you get to fuck yourself and get used to liking seeding or you lose your account.

I was using different private trackers but in the end dropped them and went back to public ones. One thing that private trackers may offer is the forum or the discussion board and plenty of user generated content. But in general there are many negative points:

• the drama: lots of users feel entitled and there is a very negative attitude towards newcomers
• less security: there was a time when an italian private tracker was caught and ended up giving the name and data of few active users. I don't buy that you have to use a legit email and no vpn.
• you have to pay for a seedbox and always track your ratio: I seed forever most stuff (4k+ torrents) but I don't want this to become a time sink