Most people in Internet communities are lurkers, meaning they only read, watch, or use, and do not write, create, or give back. From social media communities like Reddit, to online knowledge repositories like Wikipedia, to open source software projects like Log4j, this rule seems to hold true universally. We have basically accepted it as an unchangeable law, and simply take the skewed ratio of user types into account when building products and communities. But is it really impossible for lurkerless communities to exist? It’s difficult to find examples, but there is one type of community that I know of which escapes this rule: the private tracker community.

First, a short primer on private BitTorrent trackers. If you are already familiar with them, feel free to skip to the next section. BitTorrent (BT or torrent for short) is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing protocol. Instead of having a central location where files are hosted and everyone downloads from, torrents are distributed, where files are downloaded from others (peers) in the network. People with the completed files and are uploading them to others who want them are called seeders, while those who are still downloading the files are called leechers.

Being P2P has a lot of benefits, but it also presents a problem: how do you know what files are available on the network, and where the initial list of peers is to start the download? That’s where trackers come in, which are essentially hosted servers of file and peer indexes, where one can go search for files and discover the peer network to download them from. The most famous torrent tracker is probably The Pirate Bay. It’s a public tracker, which means that anyone can browse and use it. Private trackers on the other hand, restrict their usage to registered users only, often a very small community of people. These communities are usually further gated behind an invite system - to join, you must be invited by someone already in the community.

Contribution in file sharing communities primarily means uploading new files to the network or seeding existing files, a costly process with no practical gain for the contributor. Seeders need to leave their computers on, spend upload bandwidth to send the files to peers when requested (which slows down their Internet speed), and get basically nothing in return because they already have the files themselves. As a result, in most public tracker networks, many people are not so selfless and disconnect immediately after they’ve finished downloading the files they want, without sticking around to seed (this is called hit-and-run or HnR). Not so in private tracker communities.

Unlike their public counterparts, and in fact unlike almost all other online communities, private trackers have strict contribution enforcements. No “lurkers” are allowed, so to speak. Every member’s relative contribution to the network is tracked via their ratio, which is their total amount uploaded divided by their total amount downloaded. Almost all private trackers have minimum ratio requirements, set typically at around 0.6 (so you are allowed to download a bit more than you upload), but most members strive to hit at least the breakeven 1.0. New members start with some upload credit for free, since they have to leech initially, but if they cannot maintain the minimum acceptable ratio over time, they will be removed from the community.

Unsurprisingly, private trackers are almost always better than public ones, on every front imaginable. They have faster download speeds, as there are usually more seeders with more upload bandwidth. There are fewer unavailable files because people generally seed old files for much longer, indefinitely in some cases. The content selection is significantly better, both in quantity and quality, because people care more (and often there will be strict standards on content uploaded that must be met). And in many private tracker communities, there are request systems, where people can ask - using some of their upload credit as a bounty - for files that are not currently on the network. Other members can fill the request by uploading the files, and claim the reward.

There are many rules and conventions in private tracker communities that help elevate their qualities, but I think the forced-contributory rule on minimum ratios is a fundamental reason. It ensures that there are no freeloaders in an extremely fair and effective way: everyone must contribute proportionally to their consumption. I think it’s the major force of membership selection that makes many other desirable qualities of trackers possible. Conveniently, the value of the contribution is already baked into the simple ratio calculation, since you can only get upload credits if someone else wants your files and downloads from you.

Outside of the private tracker scene, I can’t really think of any other major online communities that work in a similar way. But we can imagine. What would some other communities look like, if they became enforced-contributory? Here is a couple of examples I’ve thought about.

Reddit:

• Same feature set, except lurking behaviors now cost karma
• Reading posts and comments, as well as upvoting others now cost a small amount of karma each. Karma can go into the negatives
• Posting and commenting do not grant any karma on their own, only receiving upvotes from others reward karma (to factor in the value of the contributions)
• Downvotes no longer decrease karma, but they still affect content ranking and visibility as they do now
• New members are given some amount of free karma to help with their initial content consumption
• Members that consistently have negative karma over some period of time are removed from the community

GitHub:

• Code hosting is now connected to package and library distribution networks, to track actual code usage in practice
• Points (similar but separate from GitHub stars) are granted to each account for contributory actions, including releasing open source code and having pull requests accepted
• Using code and libraries (e.g. via package managers or downloading directly) costs points, with the amount set by the maintainers
• Users with insufficient points must contribute until they have enough to download code. Allocation of points for contributions can be made generous, so that not having enough points to use a library is an extremely rare occurrence for most users
• Redistributing code in other communities that do not have a point cost to usage is prohibited
• In many cases, I think this could serve as a better alternative to GPL’s copyleft, since most companies won’t want to open source their proprietary IPs, but should be more comfortable with devoting some resources to contribute to the open source software they use

Other than implementing the basic contribution point system, I think two other things must be ensured, in order for such communities with enforced contributions to work in general:

1. Integrity of the point system: whatever is used to represent contribution must be acquirable only through direct contributory actions essential to the community, and not through any other means (e.g. purchase with real money)
2. Exclusivity of content access: the content of the community must not be redistributed elsewhere, where consumption can become free. This is difficult to enforce at scale, and mostly relies on the members complying voluntarily

These are difficult conditions to satisfy. On top of that, everyone most of the time likes to lurk, to casually consume for free without obligations. So it’s no mystery that such enforced-contributory communities are so rare, and the ones that do exist are relatively small. But by only catering to what we all instinctively want, we have perhaps deprived ourselves of an entirely different class of communities, with their own unique highly desirable properties.