Downloading stuff (you're never going to watch/listen to) purely for tactical reasons in order to improve rations or get "bonus points" (like some people here recommend) doesn't primarily sound like giving back to the community to me, it sounds more like working the system.
Kind of, but you are also giving back to the community simply by seeding the torrents imo.
Now, on the other hand people who only seed for some private tracker hidden from the outside world behind some kind of invitation only wall; that sounds a bit like some kind of collective hoarding to me and I don't really like it.
Except... that's not why it's private. It's private for security reasons, AFAIK, and also so that they can keep better tabs on their users, probably. It's not some elitist thing, pretty much every specialised tracker is private nowadays.
I have considered begging for invites to site X, in order to build enough reputation to be invited to Y, so that I may eventually join Z, but haven't done so partly because it seemed like too much work to make some kind of "file sharing career" and partly because I don't like the practice in principle.
...Dude you don't need to do that much to keep a decent JPS ratio. JPS also independent from trackers such as what.cd (which is probably what you're talking about, and I agree that they're ridiculous).
There are several reasons why torrents die faster than we'd like to on public trackers, one obviously being that most people don't bother about helping people they don't know, but another reason these days is undoubtly that too many potential seeders are busy with doing ratio building in closed private trackers.
Uh what? People don't seed on public trackers simply because nobody makes them and they don't get in trouble for not doing so.
I missed out on the open registration period on Jpopsuke, if not I'd being doing some ratio building too right now, even though I don't like it on principle. I prefer seeding stuff because I like to share, not because I must.
You make it sound like you have to do crazy maths or mind games to keep up your ratio. And I really don't see what the big deal about seeding things that you download. That's literally what you're complaining about. If you download something that you want to download, you seed it, you get bonus points and your ratio goes up if you exchange them. It's not rocket science, it's just you being lazy.
What we do know is that people usually start out as leechers and shutting out new people is not going to help any community in the long run.
JPS has ~161k users. They're only "shutting out" new people who blatantly break the rules/don't bother to read them.
I also hope it will have the same kind of gentle little "push in the back" ratio requirements that the H!O tracker did.
I read that as "I hope I won't have to do any work lol".