I've been taking notes on yesterday's viral video posting from BoingBoing on Prodigem of the Berkeley Laptop Thief rant. It shot to the number one spot (past the tsunami downloads) within 6 hours for most complete downloads. Even at this moment, it sports greater than 400 seeders and has been seeing a steady average of 10-20 "leechers" at any given time. A leecher in BitTorrent parlance is just the name given to someone that hasn't completed the download of the content. People with completed downloads are called "seeders" (seeders who stick around to help seed the torrent are the people that make bit torrent work).

Though, I've never quite cared for the term leecher. As it turns out, on the day prior to the BoingBoinging, I completed some upgrades to Prodigem which provide insights into the upload/download status of torrenters at the point at which they complete their download. To that end, at this very moment, with 8171 complete downloads, "leechers" (the people who themselves haven't even finished getting the whole video) have just past 1 GB of donated aggregate bandwidth to the laptop rant cause.

Still, some may scoff at this number in comparison to the total amount of bandwidth consumed (4.9MB * 8171 downloads =~ 40 GB), but I'm still impressed by this 1/40th effort. Considering that at any given time you join the torrent, there are roughly 20 times more people with the entire content available, I would say it's a rather valiant showing for the lowly leecher. Moreover, over 35% of all leechers provided at least 1 Byte of upload before completing their download.

So, why give a name with such negative connotation to those who haven't completed their downloads? After all, we all start out this way. Such is how it is. Perhaps leeches (and maggots) just need a PR makeover.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:42 AM in prodigem | Comments (3)  

I posit that it's acutally the leechers who encourage seeders to stay connected, which, as you say, is what makes BitTorrent work. When seeders no longer see leechers uploading from them, they feel unneeded and shut down the torrent. Of all of the factors that cause a downloader to seed, I believe that it's the desire to be helpful that dominates the others. With no upload, they have no motivation to seed.

After seeding several shows on eTree I've noticed the following pattern:

Day 1: I seed and announce it on a few mailing lists, 10-15 downloaders join the torrent.

Day 2: 40-50 downloaders. 75% of the original downloaders are still seeding.

Day 3: 10 downloaders. Perhaps 20-30 seeders remain. Most of them aren't uploading.

Day 4: 10 downloaders, 5 seeders or fewer.

A few days later, there are often no seeders other than myself and five or fewer downloaders.

The problem with this pattern is that if I want to seed another show the next week, all of my DSL is being used to supply the long tail of leechers who rarely seed. 2/3rds of the downloaders will be in the long tail, so I don't want to leave them hanging. The community isn't to blame, they are all seeding until they feel like they have done their job.

My solution is groveling to the lists for folks to re-seed so I can put up another show. Seems like there should be a better way. For example, would it make sense to create phantom automated leechers who dump their data into /dev/null just to make seeders feel useful?

Can your new logger track patterns over time for individual IP addresses? The data might be able to classify different motivations for de-seeding.

-Blake

Posted by: Blake Courter at April 21, 2005 01:30 PM

heh, interesting. i also wonder how the culture/community of the people downloading effects their seeding behavior. what shows do you record? i'm a huge etree fan. it would be great to get some of the bands represented there to put out some good soundboard stuff for purchase over here.

Posted by: gary at April 21, 2005 09:34 PM

Your marketplace concept sounds like a great model, both in general and for bands that want to sell concert recordings.

I've been putting up Dan Bern shows, some of which I taped, some of which I did the mastering. Dan also regularly permits soundboard patching.

http://bt.etree.org/?search=&cat=50&incldead=1

If you don't know Dan Bern, he's a great singer-songwriter who occasionally plays with a band. Of the shows that are up, the following are probably a good introduction:

2004-10-08: good solo show, SBD / Matrix
2002-11-15: great mellow show with band, AUD
2002-05-14: more upbeat with band, AUD

Enjoy,
-Blake

Posted by: Blake Courter at April 22, 2005 11:13 AM