I've been using private trackers since OiNK was small. I still tend my HDBits account, which is over 10 years old at this point.
Private torrents are even more susceptible to these problems than public torrents, for several reasons.
a) They have the private flag set instructing the client not to use DHT to find peers.
b) They have the user's token embedded directly in the torrent, making it unsafe to share the file. Stripping the token will make it safe to share the file, but can't actually use it, since private trackers won't serve peers to a client without a token.
c) The torrents rely on a single tracker. Public torrents can throw on a handful of trackers that accept all comers, granting extra redundancy when outages occur.
d) Private trackers are the only search engines that index that specific corpus of data, and they typically have rules preventing users from sharing "internal" or "exclusive" content.
You're right that I'm no longer really "involved in the private tracker community" because I find the invite swapping tedious and mostly just stopped caring (didn't do anything to track down and get an account at "the next What.CD", for example), but private trackers only emphasize BitTorrent's dependencies on centralized brokers.
Private torrents are even more susceptible to these problems than public torrents, for several reasons.
a) They have the private flag set instructing the client not to use DHT to find peers.
b) They have the user's token embedded directly in the torrent, making it unsafe to share the file. Stripping the token will make it safe to share the file, but can't actually use it, since private trackers won't serve peers to a client without a token.
c) The torrents rely on a single tracker. Public torrents can throw on a handful of trackers that accept all comers, granting extra redundancy when outages occur.
d) Private trackers are the only search engines that index that specific corpus of data, and they typically have rules preventing users from sharing "internal" or "exclusive" content.
You're right that I'm no longer really "involved in the private tracker community" because I find the invite swapping tedious and mostly just stopped caring (didn't do anything to track down and get an account at "the next What.CD", for example), but private trackers only emphasize BitTorrent's dependencies on centralized brokers.