cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6240929

I’m a pretty heavy torrent user, running a media server complete with sonarr/radarr for automatic downloads. I download a lot, and have multiple TBs of upload on various private trackers. I’ve been torrenting forever, but I’ve always wondered about usenet. Over and over on this, and other, forums I see people saying that usenet is way better - but why?

I understand what it is overall, but what makes it better than traditional torrenting? In my mind, it’s always just seemed like a different means to the same end. I pay for a VPN and torrent for “free”, or I pay for usenet access and download directly from there. As someone who’s “snobby” around the quality of the stuff I torrent, does usenet provide an advantage there?

Usenet fans, I’d love to hear what makes you love it! I’m always open to trying new things, and if It really is better I’d love to know why! (Plus, maybe what providers/tools etc you recommend).

  • @[email protected]English
    13•1 year ago

    With a Usenet account, I was able to make things relatively autonomous.

    I told it what I wanted and it found it immediately, downloaded it, renamed it, even replaced it with higher quality whenever it became available.

    It would find new episodes of shows I asked it to look for as they aired, new movies I was interested in as soon as they became available, Scott’s, genres, it was crazy.

    If I was at work and someone recommended me a movie, I could add it to an IMDb watch list and my PC at home would have it downloaded automatically before I even got home.

    It was way too efficient for me, I don’t watch much ‘content’ in real life, but it was so easy and efficient I ended up with dozens of TB’s of stuff that I never had the time to watch to begin with.

    I was a collector of ‘content’ and not a consumer of it. So I stopped torrenting and using Usenet.

    But Usenet is really pretty awesome with the right setup. I felt like I didn’t need to do shit once I set everything up.