I always thought it was a pretty silly system too. You end up in a situation where you want do download something, other people want to upload that thing but you don't do it because you don't want to ruin your ratio.
This in turns means that these other people don't increase their ratios and end up in the same situation. You have an artificial 0-sum game for absolutely no good reason. Then you need freeleech periods or bonuses to make up for the ratio credit "deflation".
I think it would make more sense to punish people who never seed (seeding if nobody is downloading is fine, you can't do anything about it) and incite people to seed torrents with a low seed count.
I agree. In the only private tracker I use, you get rewarded for both the amount you've seeded and also for the number of torrents you're seeding (even if nobody downloads them).
Depends on the trackers, most of the time you need an invite.
Private trackers are often topical, either focusing on movies, video games, music, ebooks etc... So if you want an invite to these you just need to hang out with people who share these interests and then ask around. IRC is a good place to start in my experience.
Some semi-private trackers also have periods where registration is open to all.
Some trackers have periods in which they have open registrations; there are a few sites which track these (like r/OpenSignups), so I subscribed to one and registered to those that seemed interesting.
Otherwise, you have to get an invite by an existing user; if you don't know any, I think the best bet is to lurk forums and IRC channels and beg for one. I never actually went that route, though.
What.cd was one of those - you literally had to get an invite from friends (inept as you that didn't work for me) or apply via IRC (can do that!), including an interview to make sure that you understood the rules and had a basic understanding of audio formats, encoding parameters.
People that brought you on were supposedly responsible for any problem you caused..
This in turns means that these other people don't increase their ratios and end up in the same situation. You have an artificial 0-sum game for absolutely no good reason. Then you need freeleech periods or bonuses to make up for the ratio credit "deflation".
I think it would make more sense to punish people who never seed (seeding if nobody is downloading is fine, you can't do anything about it) and incite people to seed torrents with a low seed count.