What could make torrenting more popular again?

Streaming providers steadily increasing their prices, while reducing the quality of their offering and forcing paying customers to watch ads.

There are a few obstacles that have been deliberately put in place since it's a protocol that allows for relatively cheap pirating, not to mention, p2p might bypass content controllers, as such we've all familiar with protect the kids angle that is used to try and stifle p2p protocols such as bit-torrent.

But in the last few years I think it's the presence of cheap CDN data that has seen some web sites wind back sharing their files via torrent as an option, as well as the idea of being able to better track their data being a benefit to them, and of course moves to allow for the collection of more tracking data, some sites or content providers have found appealing too.

With so many sites sharing data, though free, most just opt for seamless redirection, and quietly supply the data from the original cdn. I would guess this might be for legal issues, as such supplying the same via a torrent might land them in legal hot water.

Then there's the issue of how a web site chooses to serve torrent data if no one else is seeding, such as using "get right" which not all torrent clients support.

The final straw I think is the nag of incomplete data as a means to force sharing by some torrent servers. Good idea if the pool of users is plentiful, but if it's an old file that most people are done with it, it's a problem. A few years ago I recall a bunch of files I needed, I had to find another support area that did it the old fashioned way with http and ftp.

I think what is required for to grow the adoption of torrent again, is a better implementation of serving files from the host site, such as a module that incorporates something like aria2c, that could serve torrents, but also access files from a hidden https / ftp area.

With streaming providers increasing their pricing, locking down on account sharing and introducing plans with adverts, I would expect torrent use to increase in 2024.

The primary benefits of torrents are fault tolerance and high distribution provided many seeders. These things matter less for one-off downloads as people gain access to gigabit and faster home internet.

I recently found torrents to be the most sane way to download the latest eXoDOS package even though I have high reliability gigabit internet.

In many countries there's the threat of your ISP sending you a notice of you are caught torrenting without a VPN. It almost never happens (unless you happen to live in Germany) and even when it does happen the chances of them following up are close to 0.

For pirates torrents are often the only way to obtain copies of old games/movies that aren't frequently used.

Traditional hosts like mega/drive usually take them down a couple of months/years after it was uploaded, and smaller hosts inevitably die (see zippyshare, megaupload, rapidshare).

The creator of pixeldrain (a file hosting service extremely popular with pirates) said in a HN comment that their ad revenue was drying up and they had to rely on donations.

Proper adoption of IPv6 by BitTorrent clients. Since IPv4 addresses got exhausted, it became very hard to properly set torrent clients. In many residential networks it's impossible for the end user to open ports. This slows down peer discovery and upload/download speeds.

Also incorporating distributed search/discovery into clients. Tribler does something along this lines.

I wonder if the adoption of SSDs to replace conventional spinning rust HDs is contributing to decrease in torrent usage. While faster, SSDs tend to have less storage capacity when compared to a similar priced HD. Perhaps people are less inclined to shared files when they lack spare local storage capacity.

There are probably fantastic private torrent sites out there but they aren’t available to the general user.

That being said i do think that the copyright police have been pretty effective in dismantling all the best groups and trackers. I don’t think anything has shown up to replace what.cd or waffles.fm or really any of the premium torrent communities

Incorporating these technologies instead of posting in-line YouTube links would go a very long way I think?